Arguably, the notion of the fragmentary is what drives our collective interrogation of photography as a medium. Photography is an unmitigated discussion regarding what is seen, how it is represented, how it is interpreted, and how the values of the meaning of images circulate, morph, and resist concrete definitions. In this, photography could be considered a fragment of the world, a cauterized, unmoving slice from the whole. In its emasculation from the world it was, if only for a moment, part of, the photograph is dislodged from its context. We often speak about the need for context surrounding images and how veracity is challenged. Even with context assured, the photographic image does not exceed in absolutes, but rather in the challenge it negotiates with the reader or audience of the image.
In suggesting this, I believe that photography’s greater ability is not what it reveals about the world in a small, thin slice of it, but what it reveals about our desire to see the world in specific ways. Photography, as a fragment, is about our projection of the world, our inner dialogue reaching out for a discourse. It is about our need to believe, console, and impose the world as fixed, arrested, or put on hold—a truly impossible feat. Yet, it allows us to think in the fragment of frozen time that we have control, understanding, and a place in the chaos of the cosmos.
Gael del Río and Luca Bani’s book Oddments, published by Ediciones Possibles, is a book that, like Masao Yamamoyo, covers the elegic world of the darkroom photographic fragment, a pursuit that many artists of the past considered as a possible discourse for their work, but rarely materialized in a form of substantial yield. I can think of Irving Penn, for example, as an artist who used test strips from his platinum-palladium printing as a potential source of inspiration for his work, which was published in his book, Platinum Prints, in 2005. David Bailey also produced his Tears and Tears book with Steidl in 2015, incorporating his test sheets. Broomberg & Chanarin have utilized these fragments from the darkroom bin, both together and independently, in their work, finding value in the discussions regarding time and its material imprint.
With Oddments, what I find impressive is the photography, whose overprinted and grainy surfaces work as enigmatic slices of larger things. They appear imperfect, yet, as most snapshot and vernacular collectors will argue, it is the imperfections that are to be celebrated within the work. An interesting reference between the two worlds of contemporary production and vernacular aesthetics would be to suggest that many of these images remind me obliquely of an essential book from the snapshot holdings of collector Thomas Walther, entitled Other Pictures, published in 2002. This book completely changed my understanding of photography when it came out. These small, quirky images from his collection showed me the value of small things (In silence or otherwise), and when I look at Oddments, I feel that same exhilarating pulse in the work. That the photographs, culled from the darkroom fix, uneven and perhaps wrong, are the cure to the fragmentary relationship photography has with the world.
The second vital thing to recognize about Oddments is the book’s format by Ediciones Possibles. The softcover saddle-stitched book pulls out of a slipcase that has been die-cut to enshrine the cover photograph and the ghost of another image laid under one of the book’s thin sheets on the back. When pulled out and opened, the book unfolds into a constellation of these small images, carefully laid out so that they build and reform under the surface of each page. There is a slight hint of the form under the image one looks at, indicating what comes next —a ghost image that appears and dissolves again once the page has flipped.
This creates a fascinating “floating” type of image placement on the page layout that reflects the ephemeral nature of the images in their grainy dissolve. In the image and a little bit of the design, I am reminded of Julieta’s exceptional El Juego de la Madalena from a few years ago. What Oddments does is to take the conceptual load of the images and match it truly to a design that enables it to be further developed. It feels precious, but not pretentious, and the design is reflective of a team that clearly understands the images must hold the form, more than the design itself. It is an excellent synthesis of form, content, and design. Simple, yet elegant. For these reasons, I highly recommend it.
Gael del Río and Luca Bani
Oddments
Ediciones Posibles