Back to List

Roni Horn: Haraldsdóttir, Part Two (Ísland (Iceland): To Place 10) [SIGNED]

Publisher: Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9783869303178
Condition: New / No dust jacket as issued
Item #: 108319

$250.00

Specifics

First edition, first and only printing. Signed in graphite on the half-title page by Horn. Hardcover. Fine linen cloth with foil embossed title, no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Roni Horn. 144 pp., with 100 four-color and tritone plates, beautifully printed on heavy fine matte art paper by Steidl Verlag. 10-1/2 x 8-3/8 inches. This first edition was limited to 1000 hardbound copies (100 of which were reserved for a Special Edition, with print). [Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), and in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).]

Condition

New in publisher's shrink-wrap (slit open for signature).

Description

Using water as context, photographs of a woman create an intimate but ambiguous portrait where the face becomes the place. This is the tenth volume in the series of the work, To Place (It is related to Haraldsdóttir, which was published in 1996 by Ginny Williams). To Place is an ongoing series of publications. Each volume is a unique dialogue addressing the relationship between identity and place. The books take as their starting point Iceland and the evolving experiences of the artist in this country.

From Roni Horn (in a 1995 interview with Claudia Spinelli): Spinelli: "Compared to your installations, looking at and reading books is a very private way of confrontation..." Horn: "It's very intimate. A book is really a sensual, if not sexual experience and I use these books to focus people in this very intimate one-on-one relationship. The book can become a kind of mirror. The book has an inside and an outside. (A lot of things don't have that. They have only outsides; images for example.) And then you enter it and it has a fixed sequence. It has a before and an after, there is a narrative implicit in it. So all that is part of the structure that I'm using. I'm working on the sixth volume now which is completely different again. It focuses on one woman, exclusively. It's about the face as place. It's a sequence of very tight head shots. I was photographing Margrét outdoors and in water. The water and the weather became very important as the visual context. Water and weather are dominant phenomena in Iceland. So we would travel and I would photograph her in the water and in the weather. It was a very simple relationship: I didn't tell her to do anything, she would just get into the water and I would photograph her. In the sunlight and with the clouds under the open, forceful sky--the water was all around her, on her, and in her hair, and in the air as well."

Horn: "The entrance to all my work is the idea of an encyclopedia of identity. It is best represented by the books, the series called To Place, which is extremely important to me. I have been working on this since 1988. It's really the heart. It is a series of books, each one of which adds to the whole in a way that alters the identity of it retroactively. So the first volume appears to be a book of drawings. The second book was about a completely different subject but in the same format. With the third volume people start to realize something: 'Well, this looks like a series, so there must be some relationship. But I haven't a clue as to what it is.' Then there was the fourth volume, with texts and photographs. The books are this very slow process of accumulation in the period of a life, my life."

From the publisher: "In 1996, [Ginny Williams] published Roni Horn's Haraldsdóttir, the tenth book in her "To Place" series about the connections between identity and location. Haraldsdóttir contained portraits of the same Icelandic woman in water; each pose was similar to emphasize the infinite number of potential facial expressions. Haraldsdóttir Part Two contains one hundred photographs of the same woman taken a number of years later. The relationship between the two books introduces the passing of time into this intricate portrait, the latest of Horn's investigations into the people and landscape of Iceland."