My review of Antony Cairn's LDN2 (Archive of Modern Conflict, 2013) is now available on photo-eye. You can get the book here.
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Walking around the city, any city, it's easy to be distracted and not
see the buildings, especially at night. The lights shimmer and divert
our attention. The ghostly afterglow of neon signs, forelornly lit
office buildings and the endless strips of flourescent. They demarcate
the night. Antony Cairn's LDN2
is an odd architectural record. A metallic hallucinatory fever dream of
London at night. Gone are the romantically lit city streets. Instead,
light, fog and chemical drips become architectural forces – imposing
themselves in from all sides, overriding the buildings and industrial
alleyways. The lamposts and lit signs reveal and conceal a new city of
diaphanous concrete and plate glass. The odd inversions and solarized
lights sculpt the night, surrounding buildings, partially blocking them
from sight while also offering a glimpse of a little seen city, a city
glanced over and quickly forgotten when the street lamps come on.
All images © Antony Cairns and AMC, 2013
Previously self-published, LDN2
has been republished and redesigned by the Archive of Modern Conflict
in a larger deluxe edition. Initially shot on transparency film and
mounted on aluminum, Cairns subjects his film and prints to a myriad of
chemical abuses resulting in solarized and metallic images that glisten
and pulsate behind a curtain of drips, drops and pours. The tonal
inversions and chemical stains simultaneously act as a knife and veil –
penetrating and obscuring the night and city, as well as any romantic
notions we may have of the city at night. Of course, there is also the
danger and romance of chemical degradation – a beauty that can easily
devolve into cliché or gimmick. Seen in isolation that may be the case
for these images, but as a whole they gain strength and take on another
meaning, a sort of brutalist tone poem by John Zorn and Takuma Nakahira.
All images © Antony Cairns and AMC, 2013
As an object, the book is beautifully designed and printed. The unbound
pages alternate between horizontal images that rest in the top of page,
larger vertical images or full-bleed images. The pacing and the rhythmic
tension between the image sizes and orientation fit the book's furtive
and anxious nocturnal theme. The center of the book has a short essay by
Ian Jeffrey that's bookended by vellum. Translucent images on the
vellum blend with white shapes bellow to form two of Cairn's
photographs. The essay and layered images provide a brief pause in the
book.
All images © Antony Cairns and AMC, 2013
Cairns' work is a stubbornly personal, yet also dispassionately distant. Forgoing landmarks, LDN2
is an unrecognizable vision of London. It's a peripatetic journey
through an anonymous urban landscape, a labyrinth of streets, corridors
and concrete stairwells. Moving quickly, Cairns points his camera to the
lights, the concrete and glass buildings and then moves on. However,
the frenzied pace and aggressively casual manner of the shots doesn't
indicate a disregard for the subject rather it's an acknowledgement that
each image is merely a fragment or note of a larger whole.
All images © Antony Cairns and AMC, 2013
At the turn of the 20th century, there was an upswing of films about
cities – epic city symphonies that offered modernist takes on a
particular metropolis. The so called "city symphony" films focused on
the people within the city as much as the actual space. The teeming
masses moving energetically through urban spaces. Utopic in tone, they
offered a hopeful vision of the city made whole and animated by its
populace. The London of LDN2
is stripped bare of people, yet not wholly pessimistic. Only the
omnipotent lights suggest a human presence. Filtered through Cairns'
eyes, and a haze of solarization and chemical chance, London emerges as a
strange and foreign city brought to life and transformed
Please note: This review was published on photo-eye on September 30th, 2013. You can get the book here.
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