Claude Closky

Sex

Electa, Roma, February 2007, 160 pages. 21x15cm

Whether they contain words or images, Closky's books are another way of envisaging a space: In a book, you start by reading before looking, in a space you look before reading. In the tradition of Ed Ruscha (who considered his photography books as sculptures), Claude Closky imagines set-ups of language or visual elements that he redefines in the particular context of a succession of pages. The familiarity of reading gives a kind of strangeness to these day-to-day elements, here freed from the articulatory criteria of narrative, description, or any other conventional register. SEX is a collection of images of ordinary objects photographed in everyday life. Their mere two-by-two confrontation is enough to give them a gender: male on the left, female on the right. The couples thus formed are figurative via confrontation; they only discover their sex or make us blush or laugh because they meet up on the double-page spread of the book. These ordinary shots give a universal symbolism the outward face of day-to-day objects. Whatever the medium he uses, Claude Closky works on shifting the order of things in order to make us change the way we see. Translations by Gail de Courcy-Ireland [via closky.info]