When I started taking pictures around my house at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I was in Monferrato, Sessame, in what would later become my main residence. I didn't have a precise project in mind, I simply wanted to take images of the environment around me. For me, photographing means above all taking possession, in the sense of understanding, of the space around me.
So I, who until then had always lived in the city, found myself confronted with this new space, this new thing that was around me, and I used the methods, the tools I used to decipher urban space. I took my camera and started to take photographs in my own style.
This gave rise to the series of photographs on Sessame and the series of Sessame Notebooks, a series of visual notes where I gradually accumulated ideas and thoughts on this area. But ultimately it is about my relationship with photography and my way of being in the world.
I realised that this series, which began so simply, an investigation into the space around me, then allowed me to ask myself questions about how my thoughts influence my representations and how much remains enigmatic and unresolved.
A small country road that runs through a largely uninhabited area. The book follows it throughout its entire course, about three kilometres. It is the only actor and protagonist. It is a journey, an exploration of a man-made artefact and its encounter/clash with the surrounding nature. In the images, the road becomes a sort of blade, a form of abstraction, made more evident by the choice to use black and white. It contains an idea of the gaze, between the inside and the outside, and guides our vision. It is the common thread that shapes and moulds our observation, our ability to direct our gaze. It is the only space, the only raw material, the essential visual archetype. In the book’s layout, it becomes a rhythmic series of movements, of jumps made up of straight lines, curves, changes of direction, ascents and descents. This book recounts a descent into a space, an immersion into a territory that seems to have no definite beginning or end, no points of reference, just like the journey of life.
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If you move around the fields, it is not difficult to come across abandoned objects but also signs and artefacts through which men work the land. It is this set of forms that gives a sense to the Sessame landscape in its concreteness. Objects recovered and reused for other purposes, concrete columns, fabric tapes or pieces of plastic used as scarecrows. Wooden poles, baskets. This volume presents a whole collection of these materials. Objets trouvés, taken out of their context and discovered by chance wandering through these territories, alongside the marks left on the land by man, ploughed fields, furrows left by tractors or posts of newly planted rows. But also walls of villages and graffiti with mysterious meanings.
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The Flow of Time is the main character of the third volume of Quaderni Sessamesi. An imaginary place where either the artist and the viewer are challenged to question the representation of reality that Memory makes. Time as the natural course of things and Time as determined by a camera through its shutter are represented and compared. The rhythm of the images is marked by the blossoming of a cherry tree, from the first buds until the tree turns completely green. Time flows through the pages expanding and twisting. Some images look fragmented and blurred. Like memories that tend to alter and transform the reality of what happened.
This book was realized in 2022 as a ballad. Images in which I measure the space around me - dancing, moving or just sitting -are juxtaposed with images of the landscape where I lived during the same period. Alternating picturesof the landscape and myself set the rhythm of the book, first breathless and tight, then more relaxedto return finally short and unpredictable. The landscape seems impetuous, inescapable andmythological at the same time. It is like a dance or a fight between a body and a territory to find theirown space as well as between my imagination and reality around me. What I tried to do is to makevisible the identity of a place, which is my own place, elaborated by my body and brought back to thesurface by these images.
The pictures displayed in this book were shot during the 2020 lockdown. I spent that period exploring with my camera the area around my house. At first I just took pictures of the ground as if I needed to anchor to something strong and solid. As days passed and Spring arrived I started noticing those signs of Nature that was blooming again in the midst of chaos. It was an exercise of rewriting the geography around me without reference points. I just followed the flow of my inner journey. These pictures are what remains from those past moments.
The book, consisting of 26 diptychs, focuses on the formal relationships established between one image and the next where, even from the title, no information is given that can identify a specific place. It is a set of visual notes, fragments of geographies, details that together form a personal vision of reality. What emerges is an experience of looking.
The series is like a map that combines sensations, impressions, digressions of a personal wandering.Although the reality behind the images is not fictional, the entire sequence is a set of figurative puzzles constructed with inconsistent detail. Images are like embossing, but they don't work like documents.
They are the remains of moments that happened and saved from the incessant work of time. From a formal point of view, the series is mainly composed of close-up images, with little or no perspective vision. They are almost tabletop visions, closer to the taste of a graphic studio than to pictorial composition. An almost two-dimensional photograph.
52 Pictures 2017
by Edoardo Hahn
Edition of 100 copies
Softcover 48pp 18,6 x 27,9 cm
ISBN 978-88-942794-3-6
Published by Urbanautica Institute
20 euro + shipping cost
to buy contact me directly info@edoardohahn.com
This book launched a provocation. The landscape is not something of which we can control the borders, and define unambiguously the context. I should radically reject the claim, all human, to rationalize the landscape, or to describe it, to own it, to set it aside. Everything stems from a journey that I do in California to retrace an imaginary made of pages torn from movies and video clips. I do on the strings of Leonard Cohen, trying in my own way to be free. Capturing clippings of sky, roads, buildings and sunburned cars.
In this book the landscape becomes fractal, its meaning gets impalpable and slips like sand between my hands. It seems to make fun of those who watch. The images are fleeing from the page and perhaps by our own understanding. As if a book is no longer enough to contain them. The landscape is made of pieces of memory that slowly fade away. After all we are the landscape. It begins and ends with us. And maybe what’s left is a perfume. To give it a body I imagined that no photography is really indispensable. You will not find answers in this book, but the invitation to inhabit your questions.
Landscape Materials 2015
by Edoardo Hahn
Edition of 500 copies
Softcover 104pp 20,5 x 26,5 cm
ISBN 978-88-87569-60-5
Published by L'Artiere
30 euro + shipping cost
to buy contact me directly info@edoardohahn.com
Maurizio G. De Bonis "Le pieghe della realtà nelle fotografie di Edoardo Hahn."
Edmondo Bertaina "Un libro come una canzone psichedelica, un trip visivo tra fotografia e paesaggio."
Steve Bisson "Edoardo Hahn. Landscape Materials"