Bert Danckaert
Simple Present-Beijing – book + print, 2008
This is Bert Danckaert’s second major book after Make Sense.
“Sometimes it is as if everything in these pictures was moving but has come to a sudden halt. Or as if someone threw a handful of objects in the air, like in a children’s game, and they landed in an unexpected way – waiting for Bert Danckaert to turn up to photograph them. The situations are ‘everyday’ but the framing removes them from their context and their sense. The funnier the pictures, the more tragic they seem. We are overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the lives we’ve created for ourselves. The absurdity creates a crazy sort of theatre.”Lynne Cohen
We see in Bert Danckaert’s work a strangely familiar universe: that of the unremarkable, undistinguished places in which all of us spend so much of our lives, places we pass through without giving them any notice, spaces that are just trajectories, parts of a line connecting one place with another. Places, in short, that define our lives and that of so many other people in the urbanized world.
Danckaert’s work thus becomes a landmark of intercultural understanding, something that manages not to be trapped in the easy imageries of the exotic-typical, but brings us back to where things begin and end: in real human life. In an age of globalization, such levels of understanding are real, valuable forms of knowledge.
Jan Blommaert
This is a beautiful hardcover book, 30×24 cm, 128 pages, with 51 color images.
Book + original archival pigment print on fine art paper 28×18,7 cm, edition of 50.
Price: 200,- Euro
Check here for availability. See more of Bert at Piece of Cake.