Views & Reviews The wife is at work ... Rear Window Erik van der Weijde Artists Book Photography

Rear Window
[second edition]
Publisher Café Royal Books
City Southport, England
Year 2010
Pages 20 p.
Dimensions 21 x 15 cm.
Cover Paperback
Binding Staple Bound
Process Digital
Color Black-and-White
Edition Size 100

While his wife is at work and his son in school, Weijde captures the sights from his window with a video camera. Stills from the video are collected in this staple-bound book and show black and white, pixelated images of two girls in conversation and a black dog resting in the street, among other inconsequential, yet eye-drawing, happenings.

Erik van der Weijde (b. 1977) lives and works in Amsterdam, NL and Natal, BR. Erik van der Weijde’s work is bringing light to non-spectacular and common images of our daily life - the house we live in, the lamp illuminating the street, our touristic habits, family portraits and many other popular subjects. Through his consistent series of photographs, he traces a path between history, culture, education, cliché and everyday habits; thanks to the immense attention to detail he is able to trace a link between far entities. In Weijde’s treatment images become symbol’s of the subjects they portray.

His photographic work is accompanied by many different books and zines - self published or in collaboration with renewed editors - which in many cases point the attention to the idea of repetition and constancy of his photographic series, allowing the research to be fully presented through the publications.
http://www.4478zine.com/

4478ZINE's publishing manifesto:

01. The book is the carrier for my (photographic) series.
02. The printed page is the perfect form for the reproducibility of the photographic image.
03. The spread contextualizes the single images.
04. The sequence of pages may provide yet another context.
05. The collections of images are mirrored in the collectability of the actual book.
06. The ratio between the quality of the printing and the quality of the image is more complex than to be read 1:1.
07. The relation between form and content is as equally important as both parts separately, but all parts may represent different values.
08. The fetishistic character of the printed matter may provide the extra layers to strengthen the iconic value of its images.
09. The book, as an object, gains strength as it gets re-contextualized by its viewer, owner or bookcase in which it stands.
10. The connections between different publications may be invisible, but are always present.
11. The steps made in the publishing process are solely based on artistic principles.
12. If the book is like a building, then, the publisher's catalog needs proper urban planning.

De nabije omgeving van Erik van der Weijde.

In 2010 publiceerde  Erik van der Weijde i.s.m. Café Royal Books van Craig Atkinson de uitgave Rear Window. Een prachtig voorbeeld hoe Van der Weijde inspeelt op zijn nabije omgeving: "The wife is at work, the son is at school and i’m stuck in the new apartment. With a cup of coffee and my video camera. Wow, those dogs are so cool...".

Publicist, fotograaf en kunstenaar Van der Weijde focust zich in zijn werk op de minder spectaculaire en meer gewone beelden uit ons dagelijks leven; het huis waarin we leven, de straatverlichting, onze toeristische gewoontes, familie portretten en andere populaire onderwerpen. "I believe that in a way, in everyday life, everything is present, if you look carefully. The feeling a movie or a song can give you can also be obtained from a building in the street you pass by every day. I am also interested in what's behind the things we see all the time and take for granted. I also like to look for patterns. To give things a place and to try to understand them. To put my own daily life into a grid. But, pictorially speaking, I am always looking for images that are iconic. A tree, or a house, or my son, that might look like all trees, houses or kids. Images that are both unique and universal. Those are images I always look for" (bron: interview in Lightra.com).

Van der Weijde heeft een Duitse grootmoeder en is woonachtig in Brazilië. Het is daarom ook niet zo verwonderlijk dat de foto opnames vooral in Duitsland en Brazilië zijn opgenomen. In zijn nauwkeurig geordende fotoseries verbindt Van der Weijde de geschiedenis, cultuur, opleiding, het cliché en de dagelijkse gewoontes met elkaar, en toont nu en dan de zwaarte van het dagelijkse bestaan. Inspirerende kunstenaars voor Van der Weijde zijn de Duitse fotograaf Hans Peter Feldmann ("a huge eye-opener for me during art academy"), de Amerikaanse conceptuele kunstenaar Edward Ruscha, de Duitse filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder en het Zwitsers kunstenaarsduo Fischli & Weiss. "And for all the rest of what involves an art practice I would name Paul Kooiker. Both his approach to images and photography as his approach to art or an art practice in general. The time I spent as assistant in his studio were quite crucial for my own work" (bron: interview in Zineswap.com).  Lees verder ...