Bleau de Travail Charles Fréger POC Editions 29€ 2003-09 ISBN 2-915409-00-5

Steps
Charles Fréger
POC / Le Point du Jour
32€
2003-01
ISBN 2-912132-24-X

Soft cover. Text by Rosa Liksom (Finnish, French, English). Edition of 1500 copies.

Portraits photographiques et uniformes
Charles Fréger
779 editions/ SFP
17€
2001-05
ISBN 2-914573-00-6

Légionnaires Portraits photographiques et uniformes
Charles Fréger
779 / Le Chateau d’au
30€
September 2002
ISBN 2-914573-07-3

Palio
Charles Fréger
Palazzo Massari
16€
May 2003
Text by Michel Poivert (French, italian)/ text by Gaetano Sateriale (Italian, french).

Le Froid, Le Gel, L’Image Merisotakoulu
Jean-paul Curnier / Charles Fréger
Editions Léo Scheer
25€
2003-09
ISBN 2-915280-06-1

Soft cover. Text by Jean-Paul Curnier – French and English. Edition of 2000 copies.

Donneur
Charles Fréger
Ponctuation
20€
2002
ISBN 2-91317905-3

Jepata Nasta pohjoisnavalla

Rosa Liksom/ Charles Fréger
Tammi
20€
2008

ISBN 978-951-31-4136-3

EMPIRE

ITZA´Memorias Mayas

2010

There are not many photo series about Alzheimer’s. The reason seems obvious. This is a disease that is first and foremost about language. That’s what makes it so frightening: Alzheimer’s attacks its victim’s cognitive and intellectual faculties, starting with the ability to communicate.

Granser’s portraits nonetheless manifest a breathtaking immediacy. It is almost impossible to escape the fascination of these faces, to resist getting caught up in contemplating the life stories they represent.

There are few portrait series by contemporary photographers in which the protagonists are granted so much dignity and so much authority. It is true that, at the moment the shutter closes, Granser knows much more about what is going on than his subjects. He does control a situation that they do not comprehend. But what is the alternative? When journalists and literary figures write about Alzheimer’s patients, they are operating on the basis of a much more blatant incongruity. The author exercises the full range of his language skills to express himself, to make his points – whereas the patient by contrast seems to be an inferior being, because he has veered away from the world of language.

Granser does not promise us a comprehensive panorama. His series does not claim to constitute a scientific study. Cautiously, soberly and optimistically, the pictures embark on a dialogue, directing our gaze toward faces and gestures that no one would have otherwise taken the time to observe. Overstatement is not Granser’s métier. Once again: this is only one story about the traces that Alzheimer’s leaves behind. It’s about loss. It’s about dignity. And about the radiant contradictions in the human face.

- Extract from the essay „Where I did lodge last night” by Christoph Ribbat.

German/English
2005

1st Edition SOLD OUT. 2nd Edition still available.

Once upon a time, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Coney Island was a democratic paradise where rich and poor alike doffed their clothes and immersed themselves in continuous pleasures of the flesh, the eyes, and the city-dweller’s lust for thrills.

By the time Peter Granser came to check out the place it had reached a peculiar juncture. Efforts were already under way to renew the island. Granser trained his camera on a Coney Island in transition.

Granser allows his subjects a modicum of dignity, though they may seem silly, undeservedly pretentious, sad, even outrageous to a casual observer. His photographs take people on their own terms-and on our own terms, we humans prefer to think we are worth presenting to the world. Standing at a middle distance, both physically and emotionally, he maintains a lingering degree of the kind of neutrality that Walker Evans thought he could accomplish by refusing to treat his subjects like objects. Granser is wholly aware that the pride and imagination of certain people are as tacky and incongruous as the perplexing culture they maneuver in, but his comments, sometimes made by way of wry pairs of pictures, are delivered with calm irony, like a remark made by someone with a subtle sense of humor who changes neither his tone nor his facial expression

– Extracts from the essay ‘The Democratic Paradise’ by Vicki Goldberg.

Hatje Cantz 2006

German/English
2006

SOLD OUT

Peter Granser´s project “Sun City” is a series about a retirement colony in the American southwest, where you are only allowed to live, if you are over 55 years of age. In this strange city of spunky senior citizens, he encountered countless whimsical details. He took wrinkles, cacti, hair dryer hoods and plastic flamingos and compiled them into a basically true and only slightly exaggerated story about the future of aging. In “Sun City” being a senior doesn’t mean sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, looking back at the past, gradually taking one’s leave of life. Quite the opposite: Granser’s picture story is peopled by men and women who without any compromises or sentimentality have radically reinvented themselves in their latter years. Granser approaches this strange world with a sense of wonder and not with cynicism.
Christoph Ribbat, from the book “Alzheimer”

Benteli, English
2006

SOLD OUT

LUX Portraits photographiques et uniformes

Charles Fréger
Mudam
28€
2006-06
ISBN 2-919923-13-7
Soft cover commisioned by the Museum of Modern Art of Luxembourg (Mudam). Texts by Stéphane Bern-Schlanger and Didier Mouchel. Edition of 3000 copies.

Yann Gross, Horizonville. 2009 English / French July 2010 ISBN: 978-3-03764-105-7 Softcover, 245 x 315 mm 74 pages Images 50 color CHF 45 / EUR 30 / £ 25 / US 39.95

Essay by Rasmus Lanken Ottesen,

French, English

96 pp

22 x 28 cm

ACTES SUD/ Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie

ISBN# 2-7427-5616-7

Numerous levels of meaning and perception intertwine in the work of Birgitta Lund, both in subject and photographic method. On one hand, there is the theme of her personal journey from the United States to Europe – Lund returned to Denmark in 2003 after living in the US for 18 years. On the other hand, there are evocations of the timeframe in which the move occurred: 9/11, the war in Iraq, the Madrid bombings. The forces of globalization and alienation echo, in a subtle manner, throughout the work. Both themes, the personal and the global, combine and complement each other to create an atmosphere and expressiveness that go well beyond pure description.

 There are documentary and diaristic elements in Lund’s photographic method, but her pieces are not simply pages from her private photo album; there is a transmission of a collective consciousness and emotion in her work. Some images, strikingly poetic and aesthetic, are very specific: Ground Zero, the Pentagon Exit, the ports of New York and Copenhagen. Others focus more on complex metaphors. The literal and the metaphorical intertwine: no image is either simply descriptive or simply metaphorical.

 This series of photographs can be compared to a collection of poems. Birgitta Lund’s conceptual work comes out of the vision of an artist who uses photography to reflect a world in which we seem to be permanently in transit, a world where images flash onto our retinas for a few fleeting seconds before being replaced immediately by others.

 

Oliva Maria Rubio