josef chladek

on photobooks and books

Joakim Kocjancic - Europea, Max Ström, 2020, Stockholm

Hardcover with dust jacket, book design by Eleonora Bergendal.

Cities mix together into one metropolis – Europea – where borders dissolve and the focus shifts to people. “Europea” is inspired by George Steiner, who in 2003 gave an annual lecture – later published as The Idea of Europe – at the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands, where Steiner spoke like this: ”Integral components of European thought and sensibility are, in the root sense of the word, pedestrian. (…) In Greek philosophy and rhetoric, the peripatetics are, literally, those who travel on foot from polis to polis, whose teachings are itinerant. In western metrics and poetic conventions, the foot, the beat, the enjambement between verses and stanzas remind us of the close intimacies between the human body as it paces the earth and the arts of imagining. Much of the most incisive theorizing is generated by the act of walking.” Taken between 1999 to 2016, this series is an intriguing photographic depiction of an open Europe, a continent where borders are created by people and not by nature. At the same time, it is the people who cross the borders. Joakim Kocjancic portrays the city people backdropped against the urban landscape. The crowds, the architecture, the chaos, the traffic and the living conditions of people are at the center. With his black-and-white images he tries to arrange and create a balance in the fast-paced urban life and at the same time creates an inner reality of the borderland between dreams and reality.

http://www.joakimkocjancic.com/Europea

Pages: 224
Place: Stockholm
Year: 2020
Publisher: Max Ström
Size: 22 x 29 cm (approx.)