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Why this photo book?

Subways
Forfatter: Krass Clement
Forlag: Gyldendal (Danmark)
BUENOS AIRES / The city has an intensity on every street corner that seduces even the most hurried visitor. Does the book disappoint for its stereotypical and mediocre photographs?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

The photo book Subways by the Danish photographer Krass Clement is presented as «a photographic work about Buenos Aires but not in the usual sense a book about the whole city and its architecture and famous places. Rather a description of the feeling evoked by a place ».

At 184 pages, Krass Clement takes us around Buenos Aires. That Buenos Aires he as a visitor has chosen to photograph. It is primarily in the subway, in squares and public places.

The city is in many ways heaven and hell in action with an infernal traffic culture and mad and passionate inhabitants

In the press release from Gyldendal, Krass Clement says: “The city is experienced as a contrast-rich meeting between a familiar, classic European culture and a foreign Latin American. Subways alternating between photographs of places and people on streets and squares and in the subway, which brings them far and wide to different neighborhoods. The big city is difficult to define in a specific image, it is rather captured in the rhythmic flow that a book offers, in an eternal movement between precisely the recognizable and the foreign ».

The undersigned lives in Buenos Aires at the age of 23 and must, even with my best will, report a passport. Impresses, convinces and seduces the photo book – me? Unfortunately. By no means.

And even though I had never visited Buenos Aires, the photographs themselves are stereotypical without capturing «the feeling evoked by a place». If Krass Clement tries to show the feeling he has felt during his or her visits to Buenos Aires, then it is a somewhat lukewarm feeling.

The photo bo does not show the diversity of this colorful South American city with almost 13 million inhabitants. That is not the intention either, Gyldendal writes.

Subways – whose title refers to the subway better known as «el subte» – shows people on abandoned and dilapidated streets and scenes from public transport. A few pages, the photo book takes us to a natural history museum and a tango place.

It does not intend to show Buenos Aires in the classical sense. But only a feeling that the city evokes.

Without a message and without a common thread

The more you flip through Subways the greater the feeling of witnessing a shoal of photos without a message and without a common thread. The closer you get to the last page, the stronger the reader's confusion and one question: Why this photo book at all?

If the purpose is to show what Buenos Aires' feeling as a vibrant, chaotic, sensual and breathtaking metropolis is, then the photo book shows too many of the same – bad – photographs. Where is (the photos that circle) the attempt to show the diversity and contrast between classical European and foreign Latin American that the author himself points out?

Honestly could Subways just as well be a photo book from an Eastern European or run-down American metropolis. What Buenos Aires' undersigned knows evokes completely different emotions that affect the recipient and go under the skin far more than SubwaysMons monotome image series.

So sorry. It's an ommer. Or a not-at-all. The fact that certain photographs seem taken several years back pre-pandemic – for example by reading the front page of a newspaper on one photo – completes the feeling of an incomplete and fumbling photo book.

Subways seems half-hearted and without either message or direction. It is not carried by passion let alone understanding to show Buenos Aires. And they – or just the feeling that was Krass Clement's intention – are not expressed.

Buenos Aires has – and is – an intensity on every street corner that seduces even the most hurried visitor – tourist. The mix of European and South American can be seen everywhere – just not in Krass Clement's photographs. The city is in many ways heaven and hell in action with an infernal traffic culture and mad and passionate inhabitants.

Almost apathetic faces

Krass Clement's photographs exude people with expressionless, almost apathetic faces. If that's the intention to show just that feeling, then his mediocre photographs around it almost hit the spot.

It's just a lot of pages to spend on showing just that feeling and not others and just as interesting of the big city's feelings.

Om Subways is documentary or art – and whether it intends to be something or both or nothing – is subordinate. If the intention is to show what emotion a South American metropolis like Buenos Aires evokes, then Subways a strange size that never convinces nor never gets the reader's emotions in swing.

And that's a shame, because Argentina's capital is a humanly extremely fascinating metropolis with a sea of ​​subcultures and emotion-trickers that force the visitor – and the resident – through the emotional register almost daily.

That's wrong Subways bad in showing.

Rune V. Harritshøj
Rune V. Harritshøj
Writer living in Buenos Aires.

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