shashasha

“The world is everything that is the case,” begins Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influential philosophical work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Several lines from the work are littered throughout Chinese photographer Wang Juyan’s photobook “Uncharted+” with its thick and dark black-and-white photographs of natural landscapes. The multi-layered book design, which combines fold-outs, several booklets, page-spanning layouts and circle-shaped cut-outs into a dense, overwhelming construct, obfuscates any notion of beginning and end and turns the book into a journey into the unknown. As Wittgenstein’s work concerns the limits of language and science to grasp reality, so Juyan’s book seeks (and perhaps attempts to overcome) the limits of photography. An astonishing book.