“The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator,” the website of the International Booker Prize announces. For anyone who is able to speak and read more than one language, such a prize makes perfect sense, given that languages differ in any number of ways. Nuance, for example, is expressed very differently in English and Japanese. Good translation will make sure that nuances expressed differently in different languages will not get lost.
Even though I think that for all kinds of reasons photography prizes need to be abolished (they only serve to re-enforce neoliberal ideas, and that’s not even going into the issue of conflicts of interest), I find it interesting to entertain the equivalent of the International Booker Prize for photobooks. There, the roles of author and translator would be occupied by the photographer and the person who conceptualizes the book.
It might seem strange to think of making a photobook from photographs as a translation. There are books for which that translation mostly does not matter; as I’ve argued here for years, these books are mostly not very interesting at all. For most books, though, careful thinking has to be employed to fit the work in question into the relatively limited form of a book.
Done well, a photobook becomes its own work of art that stands on equal footing next to its source photographs. This fact is most obvious where at first the differences between the book and the photographs are enormous.
If you take the work of Awoiska van der Molen, the photographs have a commanding presence. By that I do not want to refer to their sizes, even though scale might play a role. Instead, it is the complex interplay of very careful studio work with the imagery itself that has an effect on viewers.
In fact, when in the presence of Van der Molen’s prints, Walter Benjamin’s talking point of a loss of aura, given the “mechanical reproduction”, makes little sense. The Marxist might have simply confused objects with what they communicate, a mistake he might not have made had he ever found himself faced with, say, a Carleton Watkins print.
When a book is made from such work, the translation into that format is crucial. You could attempt to make as large an object as possible to replicate the scale (and luxury aspect of the whole affair). But that approach treats the book as little more than a necessary evil. Instead, a bookmaker will have to try to replicate a viewer’s experience.
With Hans Gremmen, the designer and producer behind FW:Books, Van der Molen found her perfect bookmaking partner, a person uniquely capable of coming up with perfect translations. Ever since Sequester, published ten years ago, Gremmen has been producing books for this photographer.
Sequester and most of the work since has dealt with landscapes or rather with being immersed in a landscape. The specifics of the various locations in which the photographs had been taken in were of no concern for the artist or her viewers. Instead, the photographs centered on the sublime.
Van der Molen’s newest work, entitled The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves (a most clunky and unfortunate title), is less of a departure from the earlier landscapes than it might seem at first. After all, the photographer’s work does not concern itself much with what it shows; instead, it centers on what it makes a viewer feel. The feelings when confronted with those eerie, dark landscapes and these brightly illuminated, yet oddly mute windows lit up at night are very much identical.
None of the windows allow for looking in. There is the frequent presence of frosted glass, and there are curtains. It would be difficult to imagine an artist who spent so much time escaping to foreboding landscapes to suddenly develop an interest in peeking into people’s lives anyway. Sure, there are traces of those lives. But given the abstractions created by circumstances as much as the camera, these traces dissolve into abstractions.
We all want to belong. And yet…
Our Lonely Selves was first exhibited as a set of carbon prints (which I did not have the opportunity to see). Carbon prints have their own characteristics that are difficult to explain if you have never seen one. And again, how would this be translated into the book?
Careful printing would have to be of the order to get at the essence of carbon prints, and that means the right combination of paper and the layering of inks upon it. While Sequester alternated details of individual images with complete ones, this particular book remains at the level of the photographs. There would not have been a reason to zoom in to show details from large prints.
Zooming in would feel inappropriate anyway, given that as a viewer, you’re made to linger outside of someone’s home in the dark. This is where the work acquires its own edge. After all, why are you there? Why would the photographer wait outside strangers’ people’s homes (in a country far away no less) to then put her viewers into her place in a gallery or their home?
Many of the photographs are rather similar, which only serves to underscore the variations encountered: the different items whose contours are delineated and the implications that can be derived for their owners. And the viewing is ultimately frustrated anyway, because the accumulation of all of those contours does not add up to anything.
You end up traveling to a country far away to look and look and look out, only to realize that it’s within yourself that there’s more looking to be done.
You cannot escape your own loneliness, however hard you try.
You cannot shake it in any of those sweltering summer nights.
I suppose that with words someone else might have manged to achieve some of what Awoiska van der Molen achived here (Olga Tokarczuk comes to mind, in particular Flights). But words seek out being resolved in ways that photographs are unable to.
Photography’s dumb muteness will always prevent it from being fully resolved.
And in the hands of the most talented photographers, that’s a huge gift.
The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves; 56 pages | Leporello with 16 page insert; FW:Books; 2024
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