Four photographers take a trip through time

Decade by decade — From ’80s Italy to the great American road trip of the ’00s – photographers Guido Guidi, Jason Fulford, Gregory Halpern, and Viviane Sassen take us on a visual journey through the decades.

Photography freezes an ephemeral moment. It allows us to fill in the blanks, harnessing our imagination to do what it does best.

For Paul Schiek, publisher of TBW Books, time is the underlying theme of Annual Series No. 6 – a four-book set featuring the works of Guido Guidi, Jason Fulford, Gregory Halpern, and Viviane Sassen. Here, each photographer presents a series of work that has never been published in book form, creating an opportunity for visual dialogue from one artist to another.

“I started the Annual Series because I was interested in showing my own work alongside the work of other people, and then I realised quickly that I was enjoying showing other people’s work more than my own,” Schiek recalls.

Image courtesy of Jason Fulford and TBW Books

In Guido Guidi’s Dietro Casa (“behind the house”), the photographer offers a nod to ’80s Italy and Walker Evans, creating a gentle dreamscape. “Guidi wanted to present older black and white work where he was using these photographs as a marker of time,” explains Schiek. “It felt cinematic. It set the tone for the other books, and it was easy to create this compelling idea around photography and time.”

Gregory Halpern’s book, Confederate Moons, documents “The Great American Eclipse” of 2017. “I was fascinated,” Halpern says, “by the idea that the entire nation was staring at the sun, revelling in the apocalyptic thrill of watching the moon temporarily extinguish our life-source, all together.”

Viviane Sassen embraces the future of photography as a technical phenomenon with her book Heliotrope, which features digitally manipulated images made while travelling in Ethiopia, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, and South Africa.

Image courtesy of Guido Guidi and TBW Books

“I aim at subverting the way I look at these images, and at the world,” says Sassen. “Colour, graphic shapes and shadows are my tools to revisit, reinterpret and gather a different understanding of what seems familiar. The ordinary and the magical merge. The series is underpinned by the impulse to explore unknown territories, physical or metaphorical.”

Lastly, Jason Fulford’s contribution, Clayton’s Ascent, was made while travelling across the United States on a motorcycle between 1997 and 2003.

This desire to map the mysterious phenomenon of time, as it is expressed and experienced through the visible world, brings the new series into sharp focus, creating a naturally flowing rhythm between the books. “When you look at their work in a continuum, I think of it as a trip through photography and how these four artists are using time duration but taking us through decade by decade four different visual aesthetic approaches to book making,” Schiek notes.

“It’s really a heady thing that most people won’t get but that’s how I approached selecting these artists. But if you just want to look at four individual books, you can do that. There’s a lot going on if the viewer demands that from them.”