Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin
Co-published with Beijing Silvermine
For this collaboration, Max Pinckers and Thomas Sauvin rummaged through 50.000 transparencies rescued from a recycling center in Beijing. This analog archive from the 1990s consists of stock photos that were produced in the US and ended up in China when a company subsidiary was opened to market them in a new territory.
The images in this archive cover a wide array of subjects, themes, and photographic styles. They were made with the sole intention of being purchased or licensed for nonspecific contexts. They represent an era of advertising when high-quality, generic visuals would be adopted by companies to avoid the expense and effort of arranging custom photoshoots.
With stock photography embodying the most capitalist form of imagery, Pinckers and Sauvin focused their selection on the world of corporate business, represented by actors of limited talent during a time of anxiety triggered by the arrival of the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.
Reconsidered 30 years later, there is something amusing—but also disturbing, even prophetic—about these images, which seem to have lost none of their relevance with the dawn of artificial intelligence.
Graphic design by Ying Lei
hardcover, 160 x 220 mm, edition of 800, 222 pages, ISBN 9782957011810, LYRE 6, November 2023
Max Pinckers & Sam Weerdmeester
Controversy addresses the polemic of photojournalisms’ ethical credibility by engaging in the discussion surrounding Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier and confronting it with a scientific approach. A recent study by professor J. M. Susperregui, based on orographic analysis, indicates that this photograph was made elsewhere than Capa had originally claimed. This would place Capa far from the front lines, making it unlikely that the soldiers he was accompanying met any resistance, thus arguing that the photograph was staged. Does a scientific debunking of a photographic icon ultimately change its meaning, or does its relevance surpass its authenticity? Controversy poses an aesthetic answer to this question.
Design by Rudy Latoir with Max Pinckers and Sam Weerdmeester
Written contributions by Lars Kwakkenbos, J.M. Susperregui and Hans Durrer
softcover, 210 x 279 mm, edition of 750, 16 pages, ISBN 9789082465532, LYRE 5, August 2017
Sam Weerdmeester
In 2012 and 2013 Sam Weerdmeester employed a working method in which he responded to adverts for student rooms to let. He continued a routine of arranging viewings, visiting numerous addresses and photographing these rooms consistently. These photos resemble the images that usually accompany advertisement for such rooms, but without the functionality of praising a room for future renters, they appear as banal imagery; used by Weerdmeester as motifs in his repetitive task.
Score indexes the 1934 photos Weerdmeester made. Each photo can be queried on a dedicated website by its corresponding reference number.
folder, closed: 250.75 x 177.3 mm; open: 501.5 x 709.2 mm, 16 pages, edition of 300 numbered copies, ISBN 9789082465525, LYRE 4, May 2017
Max Pinckers & Daisuke Yokota
Co-published with Rorhof
Floating Worlds is a catalogue for an exhibition curated by Nicolò Degiorgis at foto-forum Gallery, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, in May 2016. The exhibition brings together Yokota's Linger and Pinckers' Two Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself, and is translated into a book by showing a selection of installation views. It is printed in two separate, but interwoven parts, held together by pages folded alternately into each other (presented in wrapping paper with a red handprinted linocut title block).
Design by Nicolò Degiorgis
Written contribution by Colin Pantall
softcover, 160 x 240 mm, edition of 1000, two books, 44 pages each,
ISBN 9788890981791, LYRE 3, July 2016
Max Pinckers & Quinten de Bruyn
Lotus was produced in 2011 by Max Pinckers and Quinten De Bruyn while students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent as their first documentary body of work, with the world of transgenders in Thailand as their subject. The gender crisis that the so-called ladyboys face is transformed into a visual metaphor about the identity crisis that contemporary documentary photography currently encounters, when it dares to reflect upon itself critically, and confront its paradoxes. The documentary photographer that captures reality as 'a fly on the wall' can't deny his or her directive and manipulative role any longer. The anonymity, the seeming absence, is merely a pose. The tableaux that the photographer captures are not lies, but enfold themselves within the studio that he or she creates from reality.
Design by Manuel Zenner
Written contribution by Hans Theys
hardcover linen, 195 x 270 mm, edition of 3000, 152 pages, ISBN 9789082465518, LYRE 2, May 2016
Gauthier Oushoorn
The Absence of a Permanent I brings together a series of different works created in 2015 by Gauthier Oushoorn in Turkey for EUROPALIA ARTS FESTIVAL. Architecture is his recurring frame of reference while his trained craftsmanship acts both as a utility and obstruction. Through sculptural work he explores various culturally and historically bound elements to create new forms and spaces.
The Absence of a Permanent I was commissioned by EUROPALIA ARTS FESTIVAL for the exhibition The Absence of a Permanent I at Centre d'innovation et de design, Grand-Hornu, Hornu, Belgium, 2015.
Design by Joe Gilmore
Written contributions by Asli Çiçek and Hans Theys
softcover, 160 x 210 mm, edition of 750, 176 pages, ISBN 9789082465501, LYRE 1, November 2015
