Double Exposures – Performance as Photography, Photography as Performance

Published by Intellect Publishing and LADA in 2015.
Hard cover, colour photographs throughout, 232 pages, 29.8x21cm 
ISBN 978-1783204090, UK.
 
 
Double Exposures is a new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. Ten years after his first, groundbreaking book, Exposures, Vason has produced another extraordinary body of work, which sets out new ways of bridging performance and photography.
For Double Exposures, Vason has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of double images.
Artists who had previously worked with Vason were invited to create two images, one of their own practice and another, where they took on the role of the photographer, shaping an image with Vason’s body. A second group of new collaborators were invited to create a performance, which could be captured in two photographs. All the images exist as doubles – pairs – diptychs.
 
Double Exposures includes commissioned essays on photography and performance by David Bate, David Evans, Dominic Johnson, Lois Keidan, Alice Maude-Roxby, Adrien Sina, Chris Townsend, and Joanna Zylinska and an interview with Helena Blaker. Themes explored include the body, the diptych, documentation, encounters, identity, mediation and the relationship between photography and performance.
 
Double Exposures collaborators:
Lucille Acevedo-Jones & Rajni Shah, Katherine Araniello, Oreet Ashery, Ron Athey, Franko B, Julia Bardsley, Dickie Beau, Ansuman Biswas, Nicola Canavan, Marisa Carnesky, Giovanna Maria Casetta, Brian Catling, Marcia Farquhar, Ernst Fischer, Eloise Fornieres, Mat Fraser, Hugo Glendinning, Helena Goldwater, Helena Hunter, David Hoyle, Iona Kewney, Noëmi Lakmaier, jamie lewis hadley, Stacy Makishi, Alastair MacLennan, Mad For Real (Cai Yuan & Jian Jun Xi), Rita Marcalo, Michael Mayhew, Nando Messias, Mouse, Martin O’Brien, Sinéad O’Donnell, Harold Offeh, Florence Peake, Áine Phillips, Joshua Sofaer, the vacuum cleaner, The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, Elvira Santamaria Torres, Aaron Williamson and Alexandra Zierle & Paul Carter.
 
Photography stages what it records; and subjects perform on that stage. In this age of the complicit auto-branding of the ‘Selfie’, it’s a relief to be reminded that the self and the camera are less knowable than we might think. In this book Manuel Vason’s collaborative photographs along with a range of nimble writers reopen for us all the uncertainties and possibilities, the trapdoors and escape hatches that make the self and the camera such wild companions.
 
David Campany, Writer, Curator and Artist, Double Exposures’ website endorsement, 2014