Luc Rabaey photography

      

Why should I Leave You, to Wound Myself on the Sharp Edges of the Night.

The title and inspiration for the series is the final chord of the poem The Taxi by the American poet Amy Lowell (1874 - 1927).
Imagery in poetry was important to Lowell, who was heavily influenced by the imagist movement, which was developing in Europe during her early entry into the poetic world.
Aside from using powerful images in her poetry, Lowell was also fond of the free verse form. In "The Taxi," Lowell uses neither a rhyming scheme nor a strict, conventional meter.
So she wrote visual poetry. That her poetry was described as such, I only discovered after I chose the poem as a starting point. I must have felt somehow that her poetry had a lot of visual potential.

 

The Taxi

 

When I go away from you

The world beats dead

Like a slackened drum.

I call out for you against the jutted stars

And shout into the ridges of the wind.

Streets coming fast,

One after the other,

Wedge you away from me,

And the lamps of the city prick my eyes

So that I can no longer see your face.

Why should I leave you,

To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

 

Amy Lowell

There is a paradox in the night. There is a certain threat, but at the same time also an alluring beauty. At night the streets are emptier and it is difficult to look. But precisely because of this there is so much to see, one becomes aware of the looking itself. Something emerges from the darkness. What is initially blurry seems to become sharper, contours take shape, meanings arise. The light does its work quietly, but resolutely. The photos tell about the aesthetics of the appearance. Precisely because of the blur the images gain intensity, liveliness and energy.
The photographer reveals himself as an observer of isolated fragments and snippets of reality. He does not show the sharp irrefutability, but a trace left between just now and soon. A moving image, a visual poem: a rhythmic, associative narrative.
And then the ‘free verse’. This too is in the way I make, select and arrange my images. There is only the mental concept in which everything is possible.

 

The book was self-published on the occasion of the Brugge Foto exhibition at the Schipperskapel Brugge, from December 8, 2016 untill January 8, 2017.

First edition of 50 copies. 40 pages.

A few copies left for 20 €, numbered and signed.

 

 

 

Unpredictable Meanings

 

Unpredictable Meanings is a simple visual examination of the confluence of circumstances.

The project started from a simple discovery: after the photo is taken, its life begins; photos have several meanings depending on the context in which they appear.

In this book, the context is determined by connecting images in surprising diptychs.

 

A collision between free particles.

Steve Bisson

 

Chaos holds a primarily negative connotation in common acceptance. The term is often associated with the disorder, confusion, and jumble. All this suggests that harmony filters through some sequence, classification, artificial, divine, and supernatural force that creates an ordering, hierarchical principle in some comforting way. Our vision of the universe and evolutionary history moves from these premises. From a primordial soup of elements, we moved on to increasingly complex and organized forms. Clouds of scattered cosmic matter have settled in recognizable planets that move on precise mathematics and interpretable trajectories.

The perception of the visible (which, for convenience, we call reality) works by approximation. Among the most advanced in the animal world, our optical apparatus allows us to recognize various shapes, colors, movements, shades, and gradations. However, modern physics investigating the substance at micro and infinitesimal scales has shown us how there is a matter that escapes the gaze and that is invisible to our eyes. In addition, the ‘psychedelia’ of quanta explains that there are no definite properties or objects for themselves, but everything is a relationship, proces, or event.

Luc Rabaey, like before him the gang of boys who overturned classical physics at the beginning of the twentieth century, questions the existence of the visible, starting from the simple but irrefutable consideration that every photograph lives in the context in which it appears. In other words, each image is an event that has meaning and sense for the instant of observation and, therefore, for the observers themselves. We can therefore argue that there is no photograph as an object except in relation to the time and space in which it presents itself or becomes represented. Suppose we shift the reflection into the boundless production of ‘pics’ that populate our imaginaries or are being proposed to us from “the outside” in different ways and formats. In that case, one wonders if there are coincidences or possible connections. Borrowing the famous title of Lorenz’s lecture, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”, I wonder if in this pulverization of images, to which we are all exposed, a click in Syracuse can cause an earthquake in Chile?

In the age of the scopic drive, and the ‘psychodrama’ of looking as an end unto itself, Rabaey invites us to problematize the obvious. We can focus on our relationship with the world mediated by technology; and on the potential textures of meaning deriving from our “visual actionism,” not necessarily motivational, topological, or contextual as often understood by critics. To search for hidden threads that weave a kaleidoscope of directions that are as possible as unlikely for our expressiveness. And this is, perhaps, a therapeutic attempt, at most subconscious, to circumvent the peculiar claim to objectivity inherent in the mechanics of image production and to partially reveal those regimes that domesticate our desires.

Exposure to “randomly selected” photographs, as in Rabaey’s case, can represent an apparent hiccup or an insignificant event capable of occasionally unlocking a systemic vision. Yet, behind a manifestation of random and asymptotic behaviors and courses, we may recognize the illusion of permanence in the gaze, and the possibility, however remote, of a collision between free particles.

 

Photography, concept & design by Luc Rabaey.

Texts from Lieven Lefere, artist and curator Track & Trace Festival Kortrijk Belgium & Steve Bisson, Chair of Photography at Paris College of Art, Art Director at Lab27 Treviso Italy, Co-Founder & Producer Blurring the Lines, Chief Editor Urbanautica.

 

Published by Fototeca Siracusana Libri, Siracusa Italy 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition at Fototeca Siracusana, May 2023. Printed by PressUP, Viterbo, Italy.

Softcover, 170 x 240 mm, 110 pages, 80 photographs.

ISBN 9788894546330 © Luc Rabaey for the photographs © the authors of the texts © 2023 All rights reserved.

 

Limited edition of 100.

A few copies left for 20 €, numbered and signed.