Photography Book

Texts by Thomas Frangenberg, Olivier Richon

Designed by Alicja Dobrucka and Kehrer Design (Anja Aronska)

Hardcover

20x24cm

128 pages

61 color ills.

English

ISBN 978-3-86828-946-6

Euro 35,00 / GBP 30.00

I like you, I like you a lot is a personal work about family and the experience of death and mourning. It responds to the tragic loss of the photographer’s 13-year-old brother Maks, who drowned while on a scout’s trip in 2008 in Poland. The pictures reveal the sequence of events in the aftermath of the tragedy.

The camera became a protecting shield from the brutal reality of a helpless situation. The deceased brother and his closest friends formed a small group. Dressed in uniforms of American soldiers they would play in the Silesian landscapes once painted by Caspar David Friedrich. Communism ended in 1990 when Poland opened its borders to a flood of Western products and ideals. Maks and his friends were the first generation to grow up under that changing culture. The camera witnesses how they were enthralled by Western and especially American archetypes.

»Kafka and Friedrich have been called upon as cultural 'off frames' that inform my reading of I like you, I like you a lot, opening and closing the visual narrative in the manner of two book ends. A writer and a painter,both from central Europe. Here photography is a narrative form predicated upon the restful silence of images — the silence of a crypt. It is a reliquary of sorts that uses the camera as a container that preserves images. The photographs are these visual relics that articulate an aesthetic and emotional relation to loss. They follow a structure of disavowal, what Freud called Verleugnung, which achieves a compromise wherein the memory of the departed is conserved and abandoned. To accept the verdict of reality and yet to maintain a belief in the existence of the departed through the photograph as relic. The photograph as relic is a frozen moment reminiscent of the arrested motion of baroque art, an art that flourished in Silesia. But these photographs are not just relics, they are also works of art with a haunting off frame.«

From the text by Olivier Richon.