Yesterday’s Sun, artist book, published by ‘Sternthal books’, Canada, 2012
To view in Vimeo -> Link
isbn – 978-0-9864835-8-5
Accompanying Uri Gershuni’s solo exhibition “Yesterday’s Sun” at Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2012
Uri Gershuni’s artist book Yesterday’s Sun at Amazon.com
In “Yesterday’s Sun”, Uri Gershuni exhibits a series of photographs taken in his journey to the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, England, famous for its former resident – William Henry Fox Talbot, which is considered one of the founding fathers of photography. Gershuni’s interest with Talbot is part of his ongoing search for an absent father figure. In his voyage, Gershuni asks to meet the father of photography while at the same time seeking his own.
The photographs in the exhibition document Talbot’s habitat as it appears in the present. Some of them contain objects and places which were the subject of the first photographs in history. Gershuni’s new photographs blend with the memory of Talbot’s photographs like a chemical collision between beginning and end. It is as though in Gershuni’s fusion of his photographs with the memory of Talbot’s photographs, we witness a nuclear occurrence, a catastrophe which melts epilogue into prologue, while everything between them burns and melts away.
Gershuni’s journey to Lacock is like a pilgrimage to a shrine to experience or see something that Talbot saw, before the end comes. To prove that only the moment in which things—universes, planets, or human beings—are born and die has any meaning, Gershuni proposes to erase and destroy everything ever photographed, except for the first photographs ever taken by man; to try to assimilate into them so as to experience the sense of revelation embodied in Talbot’s work, which is still concealed in his photographs. Subsequently, one must die out with the sun, never to photograph again.
Texts in the book:
Nissim Gal (phd), “To Increase Compassion for Reality; Retro-Photography in Yesterday’s Sun”
Rotem Rozental, “The Openness of a Dead End”
Gabriel Dove, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”
