W

W places the commonplace on an equal footing with what is presumably significant, right in line with Lukas Wassmann’s whole approach to photography. The Swiss photographer interleaves intimate snapshots and self-portraits with pictures of arranged nature, buildings and people, home-made furniture, documentary and commercial fashion photography. The Things of Life, as this hodgepodge may suggest, are often played out on the margins. So this book is about an in-between realm, not about Wassmann’s money shots. W brings together photographs from 2000 to 2018. They are not presented in any chronological or thematic order, but the associative pictorial sequences weave one loose narrative after another, only to break off and maybe take up the thread again at some point later on. Characters appear and disappear, chromatic analogies give way to choreographies of form. What remains is not even concrete things, but more atmospheric traces, a pictorial language of memory, moments in the stream of consciousness of an author with a highly idiosyncratic photographic eye.