LES RENDEZ-VOUS DU LIVRE / WITH JH Engström

Les Rendez-vous du livre, led by Rémi Coignet, founder of the website Des livres et des photos and editor in chief of the magazine The Eyes, questions the photobook field, key element of the contemporary artistic practice. The conferences will alternate between interviews with artists for who the book is at core of their approach and debates with professionals from the photography publishing world, whether they be photographer, publisher, designer, expert or bookseller.

“In 2004, I made the book Trying to Dance, designed by Patric Leo and published by Journal. Since then, it has lived a life of its own, just as books should do.

For me, Trying to Dance is more than a book – the photographs on which it was based constitute an image universe of its own. Photography then had a liberating effect on me as a visual artist. I lived mostly in New York, but also in Värmland, and travelled a lot in the United States and Europe. Mentally, I was in between worlds, between realities, between the urban and the rural. This was also a period when I questioned and doubted the importance and relevance of photography for me – actually. The freedom I so strongly experienced in the process of making Trying to Dance, largely answered my doubts and became a compass for my continued creativity.

To start with, I was not at all certain when Gösta Flemming at Journal, Patric Leo and Christian Caujolle, suggested going back to the Trying to Dance negatives. But when I started looking through the files – so many images, so many that were not used in Trying to Dance, and so many new combinations that hit me; it was then that I decided that we should publish Revoir.

Revoir is a completely new book, a revision, a revisit to that period between the mid-90s and the early 2000s. The book has been made in close and enjoyable collaboration with all the people that I worked with on Trying to Dance. Around two thirds of the photographs have not been published before. For the first time I have scanned the negatives, together with Ewa-Teréz Gölin, and allowed the present to guide me in the printing for Revoir.

Christian Caujolle has written a text for the book. This makes me especially happy, since he was the first to whole-heartedly embrace and recognise the photographs then, almost 17 years ago.”

JH Engström, Smedsby September, 2016

Conversation with JH Engström
October 20, 6:30 pm to 8 pm

> Free entrance subject to availability
> Mandatory online registration