Meeting & Signing · Jonk’s « Le Monde Perdu »

The Bookshop is delighted to welcome Jonk on Thursday 25 January for a signing session of his latest book “Le Monde perdu” (The Lost World) from 6pm to 8pm.

Registration (free): https://link.dice.fm/Nfbda5fb962a

——–

ABOUT THE BOOK

“In 2013, I visited my first abandoned site in the Paris suburbs. At the time, I was mainly photographing street art. That’s what prompted me to enter this former customs building in Pantin, which has been taken over by the crème de la crème of the Paris graffiti scene. I went back there several times before it was renovated. That first visit was a revelation. The intense atmosphere of the place, the feeling of being there where I had no right to be, the magnificent paintings reserved for a few adventurers, a path opened up that day.

I immediately started looking for similar places to find graffiti. Then, very quickly, graffiti or not, I started travelling to photograph these forgotten places. At first it was the east and north of France, then Belgium. I still remember my first ‘wasteland’ trip abroad: Germany in 2014. A few days on my own, with a few scares, including my first real contact with security guards. It was also almost my first encounter with the police… I knew that this trip would be followed by many others. Eastern Europe soon followed, then the Balkans. Then Japan, Taiwan… Later Namibia, Argentina… Passionate, I don’t do things by halves. In ten years, I’ve travelled to four continents, fifty countries and a number of places that I’ve lost count of since it topped one thousand five hundred.

Ten years after Pantin, and for me a lover of books, a publication was needed to celebrate this milestone. This book has a common thread that relates to the aesthetic I was talking about earlier: decay. This decay, this impact of time that has passed and left its mark on things, is what I find so wonderful to observe and photograph in these places. I’m looking for time capsules. Places where only time has had an impact, without human intervention. These places outside time, where time seems to stand still, attract me like nothing else. So every image in this book smells of rusty iron, peeling paint and dust… This work has twenty-two chapters that are either thematic – industrial, medical, religious, etc. – or subjects close to the author’s heart. – or subjects close to the author’s heart in this forgotten universe – textures, perspectives, abstract forms, etc.”

————————

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A photographer who has been at heart and in action since childhood, Jonk is a practitioner of urban exploration, aka urbex (for urban exploration): disregarding the notion of private property or forbidden zones, he confronts our eyes with vestiges devoured by the passing of time. His photographs, with their rare richness of grain, are astonishing, turning dilapidation into space, the outdated into the surprisingly up-to-date. Travelling across Europe (France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, etc.) in search of little-known ruins, the artist gives a (beautiful) voice to these spaces, silent witnesses to memories forgotten by all. And as the ruins shed their unsavoury reputations, image by image, our dreamy eyes are left to imagine those who, before these cracks and silence, flourished in these places, brought back to life by this creative Parisian.