In September of 2009 Dutch friends and full-time observers Perec (Taco Hidde Bakker) and Creep (Janko van der Werf) decided to start a photographic correspondence per blogspot. Perec spend a lot of time in the United States (NYC in particular) between 2008 & 2010. Creep has settled in Germany, just across the border near Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Sometimes he travels to eastern Atlantic countries like Portugal or Sierra Leone. Both gentlemen always take with them in their pockets a small digital camera. On their travels they photograph phenomena lightning up from the chaos of the ordinary quotidian.
Since October 2009 an average of about one photo a week has been added to the correspondence. The basic premise is that new additions need to correspond to the previous image, either on a strictly visual level, or in a deliberate associative way. As a result, each photograph refers both to its predecessor as well as to its successor. Hence a chain of photographic relations comes into being, growing into some sort of visual narrative with no clear beginning nor a determined closure. This narrative consists of detours, sideways, and sometimes a dead-end street. The playful photo game of visual relationships gives rise to a range of referential possibilities. To be able to follow Creep and Perec’s transpositions, an index could be made of visible variables, like colors, forms, textures, lights, patterns, and lines. Other lines that lead into the game of associations can be traced as well; binary pairs like nature/culture, life/death, and real/fake. Nevertheless, the game can be compared to a living organism, unpredictable and intuitively. It is like a lively chat or some raging jazz improvisation.
The photoblog – titled ‘A Trans-Atlantic Photo Exchange’ – clearly demonstrates that it doesn’t really matter who is where on either side of the ocean. As a result of the photographic correspondence, Creep and Perec’s visions and tastes for photographing certain phenomena perhaps merge and become interchangeable. On both sides of the Atlantic, Creep and Perec take photographs that sometimes anticipate each other in a mysterious way. Some of those end up on the blog wherein the photographs gain importance as individual images in the 'context' of previous and subsequent images. Like in any kind of correspondence, each individual contribution gets its meaning within the whole. As in an exciting written correspondence, what is at stake are reports, notifications, observations, messages, statements, challenges, questions, and most important: answers.
Be sure to see the photos either from the first post to the last or vice versa: http://fotokabinet.blogspot.com/
A paper publication of the photoblog (as a blog-scroll) is planned for early 2011.
