#41 Salvo Collective
Speaking: Sander Uitdehaag
"For us, photography is not an end point but a starting point."
Salvo Collective, formed by Anne Geene, Arjan de Nooy, Sander Uitdehaag and Vincent van Baar, has been making publications around a self-imposed, photographically tinted theme since 2012. In it they turn the medium of photography inside out.
Salvo makes and shakes photography.
The exhibition and the publications are quasi scientific, but above all: hilarious. And who better to explain what they do than Salvo themselves?
During the opening of the exhibition NOTHING. CLICK. EVERYTHING on Friday evening, October 30, 2021, Sander Uitdehaag read the following text:
“As Salvo, we have always been guided by chance.
Coincidence brought us together at the art academy in The Hague.
After individual routes through various other academies and professions (from philosophy, chemistry, graphic design, literature and art and cultural sciences), we suddenly found ourselves in the class of the part-time photography course.
It actually went off right away: we shot a lot in the street and in the woods, we discovered the darkroom, hung photos upside down, and found each other in the fun that photography can be so many things.
Research
Detail
guess
Opinion
Humour
Take it out of context
To put in context
After that academy we flew out, but the idea also arose to do something with that shared fascination for the medium, again in a somewhat coincidental way. I think one of us, after a heated discussion, jumped on a table and yelled, Now we're going to make a booklet about this.
And so it happened: van deze foto ga je dood (from this photo you will die) became our first book. We explored the analogy between a hunter and a photographer, who both sneak, approach a subject, which they try to capture by pulling the trigger, by shooting (a picture), transforming the subject into an object.
From there we continued to investigate that medium for each characteristic.
We researched movement;
the actual size versus the representation;
the reproducibility of photos;
fluke;
the noise in a photo: accidentally leaked information that you didn't even realize you were recording because you focused on 1 thing..
The latter is perhaps one of the motivations that has propelled us forward over the past 10 years. For us, unlike many photographers, a photo is not an end point. We do not work towards a perfect picture that summarizes, concludes a thought or inquiry or feeling. We see photos more as a starting point. According to us a photo is an invitation to start looking.
Kind of like you do today, really: we take pictures to look at them, to see what else they can be, or what contradictory or unexpected things they can say if we rearrange, cut, blow up, flip them.
We always try to create a new context.
As seen in our new publication, which is called Out-And-Out. We didn't take 1 picture for it, and yet it is our thickest book. We cut every page 4 times from all our previous publications. Each of us devised a new route with these pages. This resulted in 4 unique sequences.
Follow your own route through this dynamic space. There is no beginning or end, there is only the route you make yourself.
All our books are on the reading table. One of them is called Nothing. Click. Everything, the same title as this exhibition. Subject is 'the first picture'. New organisms are discovered every day. We call the first photo of such an organism a holotype. Trainee Amy prints them out every day and sticks them on the wall and on page 28 of the publication: so not even a day and no book are the same, not even after publication and layout.
Finally, in the other room are all photos from our third issue, titled Krakow Automatik. Read the story of the first 36 photos, taken without human interference, on one of the walls in the room (and admire the special maker under the bell jar).
We are going to shoot at it with a salvo of shots and sign the photos that way.
And open the exhibition.
They are for sale for 15 euros, and you get a publication of your choice. Irma can tell you all about it.
Anne reads a short text from the first issue, but first proceed to the room next door.
One last thing: thank you Petra for allowing us to perform this exhibition in this way. You are a warm host. And we are grateful that we can show an overview here one more time. There's a rumor that we're quitting, and I think all four of us think so too. But just as it blows through our work, the wind of chance seems to be blowing through this exhibition: a pandemic has already postponed it twice. But now that it's finally here, it turns out that it has already been extended by a week – we just heard. It doesn't seem up to us when we say goodbye to Salvo, so keep your eyes open!"
Read the text that Anne Geene read here:
“how much time do you have if you could fire a bullet parallel to the Earth's surface (exactly between all the mountain ranges) that never slows down until it returns to the point it departed from (until he drilled into your back somewhere)?
do you have time to turn around? do you have time to take a picture?
multiple photos? a series, enough series for a photo magazine? can you step aside, move an easel to where you were standing when you fired the shot, and wait for the bullet to whiz through your canvas?”
GOOGLE VIEW through the exhibition of Salvo: https://goo.gl/maps/uxEWaETM4f1DMoDr5
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