shashasha

"Loops" is Anders Edström’s narrative chronology, from front to back covers. Shot during walks driving, during his travels, always looking, noticing, then stopping when the light and circumstance synthesize for him. He doesn’t look for the spectacular or unusual, but rather for the preternatural union of light and circumstance. For this reason, they may seem mundane, but each is a statement about this union of light, time, and energy.

Interspersed are reflective paint puddles, which he poured at home, getting the light to work for him. Each is a study in “light, form, and texture” — to use E.H. Gombrich’s words from his essay on 15th century paintings north and south of the Alps.

In "Loops", they are the creative investigations during this chronology. In Vladimir Nabokov’s "Bend Sinister", the novel before writing "Lolita", one of his tropes was a puddle, which his main character, Adam Krug, first notices gazing out a window, a recent widower. Puddles distort reflections in reverse, like a “Bend Sinister,” a heraldic shield with the band going from top left to bottom right instead of the reverse, a bend dexter. The puddle motif reappears as an inkblot, a footprint, an ink stain. Nabokov was a lucky sufferer of synesthesia, the crossing of one sensory modality into another, with words revealing different meanings. He played with language as sound and image, “caressing” details, as he called it, looking for the unnoticed, infusing his stories with undercurrents of his special intuition.

Anders Edström was first discovered by the fashion industry, and first by Martin Margiela, who changed the look of fashion by being unspectacular, for example, simply covering boots, jeans, and backpacks in white gesso. Like Margiela, Anders Edström has always avoided the transcendent, spectacular, or highly stylized in preference for unaffected naturalism, but also for an alternative enlightenment in his synesthetic photography. "Loops" is a time capsule of his research.

― Jeff Rian