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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
Kris Vervaeke
Ad Infinitum
Self-Published, 2013
133 color illustrations, 5½” x 8"
Also reviewed on: photo-eye
Additional links: LensCulture, The Independent Photobook, It's Nice That
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
Belgian photographer Kris Vervaeke's Ad Infinitum presents 133 rephotographed porcelain portraits found on tombstones in Hong Kong between 2008 and 2010. The images are cropped tight, eliminating all contextual information and leaving us confronting a series of heavily weathered portraits of the deceased. They are similarly cropped, head-and-shoulder portraits of the type you'd see in a yearbook or on a government document. While the images are in color, most stay within a very minimalist color range; in fact, most are effectively black and white images.
Vervaeke's self-published book elegantly develops the book's design as an extension of the images' aesthetics. Design details are thoughtfully considered: the first half of the book's pages are edged in black, the back half in white; the front cover is black, the back white and they fade into each other on the spine. The decisions create a simple, unified object based in the images themselves.
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
I suppose there were (at least) two hands Vervaeke could have played with this sort of typology. Instead of opting for a strategy emphasizing the personal aspect of each portrait and relating them to the observer - by making them, for example, head-sized on the page in a larger book layout, by giving us much fewer images so that we would focus on each face longer, or by giving names and biographical context - Vervaeke instead opts for a strategy of anonymity and volume. The photographs are presented one after the other – stopping just for a single-page essay by Vervaeke in the middle of the book – replacing a sense of the individual face with a experience of the collective one as the differences between images and faces blur ultimately into a single vision of decay over time. This experience of anonymity is reinforced by the advanced state of decay most images have suffered.
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
The question becomes what does this experience of anonymity and volume do to the observer of these photographs?
The book initially remains a compendium of abstractions and patterns, a notebook on the natural geometries of decay played out on the surface of the image. I have no sense of the lives of the faces in the images, and therefore ultimately no stake in their death. Their visual decomposition is powerful, but just to a point, playing on overly direct connections between the concept of mortality through the erasure of images and the limits of photographs as memory.
Spending further time with the book, however, the experience of it evolves into something significantly more powerful. Without a specific person inside the book to attach ideas of mortality and erasure to, the ideas eventually gravitate and attach to the first person that comes to mind in every observer of a work of art – themselves. The circuit closes: this abstract decay of anonymous subjects becomes the most intimate and internal of conversations about our own inevitable end. The lack of information allows us to be the protagonists ourselves.
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
While the volume of images is necessary to release us from the specifics of biography and to eventually lead us to this idea of our own end, I wonder if a smaller selection of images couldn't have been used, if Ad Infinitum couldn't have been a little less literal. I raise the question because the volume of photographs allows an escape from this discomforting confrontation with our death by giving a reason to put the book down and walk away. Half-way through, the point is made, we can opt out. Here a smaller selection of images could foster an extended confrontation with the book's unsettling ultimate message.
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
Another question: I don't see progression in the image sequence, but repetition. That is to say any two images generally feel like they could be swapped and it wouldn't matter beyond trying to avoid a bunch of portraits of guys in sunglasses in a row or the same sort of decay in a series of images. Could the themes and experience of the book be enhanced by working with progressive sequencing ideas instead of repetition?
Even while left with a few questions about the number of images and sequencing, the concept is clean and tight, the book offers more rewards with extended viewing and Vervaeke should be commended for going quite far with a limited idea.
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |
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| From the series "Ad Infinitum" © Kris Vervaeke |