Download PDF - John Rule Art Book Distribution

Available: January 2013
ISBN: 9783936165517
Price: £50.00
Format: Hardback
Pages: 160
Illustrations: 122 tritone photographs
Size: 300 x 240 mm
Category: Photography
Rights: Worldwide, except
Germany, Austria and
Switzerland
Available: January 2013
ISBN: 9783936165531
Price: £20.50
Format: Paperback
Pages: 76
Illustrations: 34 tritone photographs,
Size: 220 x 170 mm
Category: Photography
Rights: Worldwide, except
Germany, Austria and
Switzerland
Also available in a hardback limited
edition of 300 copies
ISBN: 9783936165548
Price: £39.00
20 Years of Photography
William Ropp
In this impressive volume, William Ropp peels back the layers of man’s
underlying preoccupations: sex, death and god. At times frightening, at
others heart-rending, Ropp’s smoky black and white images envision
a genealogy of imagery and figures familiar from dreams, longings
and collective memory. His women recall deities – ancient fertility
symbols, the sacred mother, the fallen angel. Ropp’s lens captures a
sense of the ancient and archaic; human frailty, the fleeting smile of a
Mona Lisa, a study of skeletal remains, the glimpse of a human death’s
head. But the work here is not hackneyed or stereotypical. Ropp gives
us images of who we are, reflecting our personal realities in a vaster,
more penetrating looking-glass. As poet and photographic historian
John Wood observes in his incisive introductory essay: “We leave the
experience of his work with no false comfort, but the knowledge that
our fears are not unique but part of humanity’s ageless, repeating
drama.”
Dreamt Memories from Africa
William Ropp
William Ropp, born in 1960 in Versailles, France, has emerged as one of
Europe's most ingenious and creative photographers. He is well-known
for the unique style in which he captures the mysterious aspects of
human nature. “Thankfully, not all photographers of children allegorize
or eroticize their subjects. William Ropp's children are impassioned,
fierce, questioning, undaunted. These images were taken in Mali
where Ropp travelled, following in the footsteps of his ancestor Louis
Jaccoliot, to the mythic city of Timbuktu . Although the title refers to
dreams, the photographs we see are reflections of a nightmarish world;
Ropp described Mali as "hell". The huge staring eyes, the shadowy
indeterminate landscapes, the threadbare clothing - these are images
from the bleakness of a developing world where children are born
already knowing, already shaped for the lives they will grow into. Ropp's
lens presents these children without sentiment or fallacies, rendering
the grit of their everyday lives with grace and dignity.
JOHN RULE Spring 2013
Photography
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