Geographical Analogies

This artist’s book is based on Cyprien Gaillard’s “Geographical Analogies,” a collection of 900 Polaroids, carefully and rigorously arranged in a total of 100 showcases, telling many stories about landscapes, monuments, modernist buildings, and architectonic utopias, and just as many stories about decay, destruction, and devastation.

As Rein Wolfs puts it in the introduction of this publication “Gaillard’s epic work, outmodedly analog … reflects a computation of time that seems to have disappeared …. In the disintegrating medium of Polaroid photography the aspect of disappearance inherent to time is documented and allegedly temporarily halted—until in foreseeable time these originals too will have disappeared beyond recall … Decay, disappearance, remembrance and decline are omnipresent motifs in this work … Numerous devastated concrete landscapes, unfinished holiday developments, monuments, ruins, modernist high-rise estates, cemeteries, landscapes and—as a counterpoint—golf courses stand for an equal number of failed ambitions, or decaying cultural testimonies to their time … But the ‘Geographical Analogies’ can be conserved for perpetuity in the format of this book which, like an atlas arranging things at a different level, represents a further stage of scientific classification: a global atlas full of ruins of the Gaillard trademark. A world atlas against disappearance.”

Edited by Florence Derieux, Susanne Gaensheimer, Adam Szymczyk, Rein Wolfs.