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Background information
'NOWHERE. Imagining The Global City' is the most comprehensive monographic publication to date by Dutch photographer Frank van der SALM, who 'is in no way an 'architectural photographer' in the classical sense. Rather, he turns thinking around and uses architecture to create photographic images; he makes 'photography with architecture'(...). He uses, to put it another way, architecture for his images." (© Urs Stahel)
The photo volume 'NOWHERE. Imagining The Global City' shows a world that is mainly concerned with Instagrammability; where the new reality is dictated by the seductive image that can (later) be made of it. Architecture, design and urban landscape, directed by the mechanisms of global big business. The same antiseptic beauty, all over the world.
Content
The photo book designed by Irma BOOM 'NOWHERE. Imagining The Global City' gathers the works of Dutch photographer Frank van der SALM of the last 25 years. Images of an imaginary, radically consumerist metropolis emerge before the viewer's inner eye. The book design by Dutch book designer Irma BOOM is congenially radical: images - sometimes deliberately turned upside down - interrogate each other about the realities they represent. Together they form the image of a city that suddenly seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time: both here now and here or nowhere.... 'NOWHERE. Imagining The Global City' also includes texts by Shumon Basar, Aaron Betsky and Urs Stahel that connect Frank van der Salm's oeuvre to the world of design, architecture, urbanism, art and photography.
Review
"In the waiting period of the pandemic, Frank van der Salm's images feel different. They suddenly take on the qualities of prophetic realism (...) His urban views, his bucolic landscapes, his portraits of supermodernity are mostly devoid of people." (© Shumon Basar)
"They are photographs of something and art about something. They don't present reality as particularly alien, in the sense that it is completely different or somewhere else, either in a surreal sense or in a simple sense. It's our here and now, and if it's not our here and now, Van der Salm shows us that it soon will be." (© Aaron Betsky)
About Dutch photographer Frank van der SALM (b. 1964)
Photo books by and with participation of Frank van der SALM