Above and Below (*w/ signed print*)

Excerpts from the text included in the book :

"Above and Below is a reference to the title of a work by Mark Lewis which he made in Sao Paolo in 2014: Above and Below the Minhocão. The film was shot in the city centre and its subject is an elevated motorway that crosses the city. The motorway, nowadays, is closed to traffic on weekday evenings and all day Sunday, when it becomes an urban park populated by walkers and cyclists. (...)

The notion of experience lies at the heart of Mark Lewis’ work. Most of his works are short films involving the development of a single shot. The camera advances slowly in the shot and gives the impression of time being stretched, even though nothing is in slow motion. Space also seems to be stretched, while the slow movement of the camera as it lingers on the shot “opens” the shot towards what might be called a “spread” image. In this way, the spectator is drawn in, and the impression is intensified by the size of the projection. (...) What is produced is a sensory experience, an experience with the potential to create in the spectator confronted with the work a broadened consciousness of the world.

The camera movements in the work of Mark Lewis and the insistent way in which he uses them set up another process which slightly resembles dizziness - a vertigo that creates a loss of bearings; that opens up a field of possibilities at the same time as it thwarts the usual way in which the body stands, and recognises and experiences its surroundings. In fact, vertigo imposes a new way of looking at the world on the person suffering from it. (…)

In many films of Mark Lewis, capitalism and bare life are inextricably bound up with each other in his vertiginous and repeated plunges into real-life and the interstices of real-life. (…) Once again, what we are being shown here is the potentiality of life. This intensity which changes things, which wrenches the world out of its apparent immutability, can only be captured by attentive scrutiny, by being, in one word, attention itself.

  --  Chantal Pontbriand"

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition "Mark Lewis, Above and Below" at Le BAL, Paris, from Feb. 5th to May 3rd, 2015.

We are offering a special edition of the book with a signed and numbered Cibachrome print (11 x 19 cm). Two different images are offered by the publisher (see photos), each one in a limited number of 100 copies. Please let us now of your choice upon ordering.

The images are from the artist's studio and from Le BAL.

You can read an interview of Mark Lewis (in English) and a review of the book on the French website L'Oeil de la Photographie.

304 pages - Softcover

Le BAL, 2015

*w/ Signed Print*

New - Mint condition