The Process & Bios

Notes on "Love and War"
by Jónas Knútsson

To organize is to destroy and sometimes I'll try to dig up some text to accompany an image by Christian that complements rather than explains the photo. But in this case he came up with images from his striking catalogue of b/w New York photographs to complete these vignettes from my compendium piece in-process 101 Scenes from America.

Taking a cue from the beginning line of Isherwood's Berlin Tales, "I am a camera" I tried to "photograph" scenes from America with my text. Christian then followed these up with his evocative photos which somehow always convey the precise mood I was striving for.

Our goal is always that the text and image form a tertium quid, that the pictures and descriptions stand on their own but never render one another redundant. The strength of Christian's images lies in their rich variety of texture and meaning and to tag some exhaustive interpretation to them would be a reductio ad absurdum so the trick is to let the words and images ride tandem, so to speak, without tripping one another up and becoming entangled in some sort of superfluous running commentary on one another.

~

Bios

Christian Tuempling is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY, where he resides since 1988. He is focused on "building" imagery from ideas felt rather than seen. His work is in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Transit Museum and private collectors. He is currently showing "Botanica" at the Brooklyn Public Library central branch until June 25 2011.

Jónas Knútsson is a sometime writer who lives in Reykjavík, Iceland, and is currently at work on an Icelandic translation of Cicero's Catilinarian speeches.

~

Christian and Jonas collaborated before in BluePrintReview with Streets of Reykjavik

~

back to the collaboration