By Lytle Shaw. Edited by Lex Trüb, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi.
The life of legendary Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré is so shrouded in speculation that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure whose name will forever be linked with the well-known printer’s error. Yet as scholar Lytle Shaw reveals in The Moiré Effect, when it comes to Monsieur Moiré and his circle, fact is often stranger than fiction. Tracking the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures--including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolf Steiner and several members of the secretive Chadwick family--The Moiré Effect takes readers on a journey from the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi to the dusty bowels of ancient archives to a conclusion as hair-raising as it is oblique.
Featured image is reproduced from The Moiré Effect.
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FROM THE BOOK
""In April of 2010… a mysterious package, lacking return address, arrived at the door of a cabin I had recently completed in a remote portion of New Hampshire. Mysterious in part because only three or four of my closest friends had the address—and I was only staying at the cabin for a week. But more mysterious in its contents: a series of halftone page mockups that immediately sent a shiver up my spine. For they included photographs that appeared to be Moiré’s. I had known about them from other materials in the archive, but had assumed these photos lost. The pages were arranged in Moiré’s characteristic grid, like specimen typologies, and focused particularly on Swiss farmhouses built of masonry corners, vertical timber infills and slate tile roofs. In between and around the margins were brief commentaries in a sans-serif font. The typologies also included bridges, electricity towers, and mountain drainage devices. Such images, in themselves, might not have been enough to convince me that the work was Moiré’s, but the pages also contained fair copy corrections in what I recognized as Moiré’s hand: “a condensation of native Alpine materials, sorted to maximum strength,” he had added next to one farmhouse. On another he wrote, enigmatically, “When gravity wins, no one hears.” What was this? What would it mean for gravity to “win”? Had Moiré spent too long in the Alpine sun on his fieldtrips? In any case, nothing prepared me for the final three images: the same farmhouses, but now moiréd." - Excerpt is from The Moiré Effect.
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FORMAT: Pbk, 4.5 x 7.25 in. / 128 pgs / 10 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $12.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $17.5 GBP £10.00 ISBN: 9783952339138 PUBLISHER: Book Horse/Cabinet Books AVAILABLE: 7/31/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA EUR ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Book Horse/Cabinet Books. By Lytle Shaw. Edited by Lex Trüb, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi.
The life of legendary Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré is so shrouded in speculation that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure whose name will forever be linked with the well-known printer’s error. Yet as scholar Lytle Shaw reveals in The Moiré Effect, when it comes to Monsieur Moiré and his circle, fact is often stranger than fiction. Tracking the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures--including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolf Steiner and several members of the secretive Chadwick family--The Moiré Effect takes readers on a journey from the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi to the dusty bowels of ancient archives to a conclusion as hair-raising as it is oblique.
