Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
APERTURE
JH Engström: Tout Va Bien
Swedish artist JH Engström (born 1969) is an inveterate bookmaker. Most recently, his published works have explored ideas of place and home, including Sketch of Paris (Aperture, 2013), La Résidence (2010), From Back Home (2009) and CDG/JHE (2008). After more than a decade of such thematic projects, Tout Va Bien returns to the looser, more associative approach of Engström’s critically acclaimed volume Trying to Dance (2003). The source for these photographs is nevertheless strongly autobiographical, as well as vividly metaphorical; a reemphasis of the artist’s belief in photography's potential as visual poetry. The sequencing is highly charged with contrasts: black-and-white images mix with color; the gentle beauty of coastal rocks clashes with a flash-lit image of the bright, blood-red placentas from the birth of his twins. The book leaves it to the viewer to map his or her own network of meaning from image to image, page to page.
Featured image is reproduced from JH Engström: Tout Va Bien.
Featured image is reproduced from Tout va Bien, Swedish photographer JH Engström's dark, poetic and yet supremely hopeful fifteenth artist's book, published by Aperture. A sort of self-portrait through the people and places of his home—including the flora and fauna, his twins (and their delivery, and afterbirth) and other evocative, sometimes shadowy figures, places and abstract intimacies—this body of work was honored with a 2015 Leica award. Engström writes, "Settled between the forest, fields, and lakes I watch my children grow up here. Time and doubt are my most precious tools. Thinking of truth as submissive to both silence and language.
I realize my photographs are my shelter, more than anything. It's later now. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.75 x 11 in. 152 pgs / 56 color LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 ISBN: 9781597113489 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 10/27/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Swedish artist JH Engström (born 1969) is an inveterate bookmaker. Most recently, his published works have explored ideas of place and home, including Sketch of Paris (Aperture, 2013), La Résidence (2010), From Back Home (2009) and CDG/JHE (2008). After more than a decade of such thematic projects, Tout Va Bien returns to the looser, more associative approach of Engström’s critically acclaimed volume Trying to Dance (2003). The source for these photographs is nevertheless strongly autobiographical, as well as vividly metaphorical; a reemphasis of the artist’s belief in photography's potential as visual poetry. The sequencing is highly charged with contrasts: black-and-white images mix with color; the gentle beauty of coastal rocks clashes with a flash-lit image of the bright, blood-red placentas from the birth of his twins. The book leaves it to the viewer to map his or her own network of meaning from image to image, page to page.
