{"id":5674,"date":"2016-08-08T14:05:20","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T14:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vetalight.it\/dev\/?p=5674\/"},"modified":"2020-05-05T14:41:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T14:41:51","slug":"max-pam-promises-to-keep-curated-by-laura-serani-design-by-gianni-giulianelli-lartiere-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lartiere.com\/en\/max-pam-promises-to-keep-curated-by-laura-serani-design-by-gianni-giulianelli-lartiere-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Max Pam “Promises To keep” Curated by laura Serani, Design by Gianni Giulianelli; L’Artiere Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Promises to keep<\/em> and promises kept<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n
\u00a0\r\n\r\n\"\"\r\n\r\n\u00a0\r\n\r\nWith a title that invites you to imagine even before you've flipped through the book's pages, Max Pam's album, a compendium of maps, photographs\/postcards and notes, recalls, most immediately, a travel journal.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nThe journal of a long voyage begun in the 1970s, which has repeatedly taken him back to India, to the Far East, to London or Paris, and whose starting and ending point is always Australia.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nUltimately, however, and notwithstanding the importance of travel to the artist's trajectory, this is not so much a travel journal as a diary that confirms Pam's interest in photography and his turn to it as a form of autobiographical expression. In order to tell his own history \u2013 as well as his stories \u2013 Max Pam has invented and gradually perfected an original visual language that recognizes no distinctions between writing and photography, between an image borrowed and an image taken, between the effects of chemistry and those of painting, between collage and patchwork. The result is a collection of forcefully suggestive images that, in breathtaking sequences, establish dialogues among reality, hallucinations, references of all kinds, the intimate and social spheres.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nIt recalls the early days of modern photography, when the postcard phenomenon exploded; a phenomenon that lasted only a couple of decades, at the beginning of the last century, but that profoundly marked not only the era's popular imaginary, whose desires and aspirations it reflected (promises of love, vacation and progress) but also the artistic avant-gardes of the Twenties and Thirties. A flourishing industry that developed mainly in Europe, it privileged real photographic prints, on silver gelatin, that were later colored by hand, or otherwise photo-collages made by combining images and drawings and multiple exposures, all of which were distributed in faraway continents like South America or, indeed, Australia.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nMax Pam's first extraordinary journey, which came about somewhat fortuitously \u2013 in response to a classified ad by an astrophysicist in search of a travel companion to drive from Calcutta to London in a Volkswagen Beetle \u2013 had an impact, just as extraordinary, on his life and work. It was early 1970 and the origin of Pam's endless attraction to Asia, his curiosity for people, his capacity to recount his own experiences through those of other's, to discover new worlds, to penetrate them and give them back, transforming reality just as much as he himself would end up being transformed by it.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nMax Pam travels like he breathes and photographs with the same spontaneity, with the intrepid lightness of the surfer, with curiosity for sirens, artificial paradises and hippy communes. A self-conscious \u201canti-tourist,\u201d he is not indifferent to the symbolism and the enticement of souvenirs, to those panoplies of the perfect tourist which he joyously appropriates.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nMoving beyond the well-trodden paths of photography and of any kind of conformism, he plays with clich\u00e9s like a juggler; his images are liberating, they infringe taboos and preconceptions.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nBooks constitute the ideal support of his universe. Dense with images, signs, messages both direct and subliminal, devoid of empty pages or margins, breathless, they produce a trance-like effect. Like esoteric objects, they surprise and captivate one moment, provoke and frighten the next.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nPromises to keep confirms this principle and goes still further, in its intriguing miscellany of iconographic sources, whose provenances are diverse and effects oneiric: pages from atlases, maps, posters and \u201cfake\u201d postcards. A continuous intermingling of past and present.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nHere, old papers are \u201crevisited and inhabited\u201d like a kind of treasure map, each one introducing the regions and cities where the next action will take place.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/em>\r\n\r\nFramed and enriched by antique reproductions of places and historical figures, with postage stamps and seals collected over time, with advertisements or photographs of landscapes and portraits of friends and strangers, each image is a planet that encloses dozens of stories. Then, page after page, the decor changes, new actors enter and exit the scene, Max Pam listens, shares, tells.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nThere's the encounter with the London kids, which, even more than the city's fog, disposed of any aspiration to raise his children in Europe. The grand illusions, the disappointments, the values and culture of the old Europe, the charm and condescension of the bourgeoisie.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nThe passion for India and Nepal, for the journey of initiation \u2013 which set him on the path of photography \u2013 for archeology, landscape and the density of the city as so many revelations, for the philosophy of the sacred and the everyday. The magnetic attraction of Tibet and Mount Everest, the search for spirituality and a higher equilibrium, the discovery of altitude and mountains, nonexistent in Australia. Still further East, the ostentatious nonchalance and embarrassing advances of the girls in hotel bars, the desolation of the rooms, the sex for sale, banal as a coffee, the tenderness and resignation, the carefree fun and sad drugs.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nAll of it is conveyed through the images\/postcards that Max Pam began making and sending during his first famous journey. Later, they became his privileged mode of correspondence with friends, first and foremost Bernard Plossu, who, like a clin d'oeil, makes an appearance in Promises to keep. A way of sharing and expressing oneself that evolved into a real creative process and, in time, has constituted a corpus, a work, where powerful photographs in black and white, revisited, play with surreal fantasies and mysterious dreams, among poetry, sensuality and irony, like the images of the golden age of postcards.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0\r\n\r\nLaura Serani\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\r\n\r\nPROMISES TO KEEP<\/a>\r\n\r\nPhotography by \u00a0Max Pam<\/a>\r\n\r\nText:\u00a0Laura Serani\r\n\r\nL'Artiere Publishing\r\n\r\n2016\r\n\r\nSize of the book: 24.5 x 30.5 cm\r\n\r\n104 pages - Four-colour printing\r\n\r\nFirst Edition: 500 copies\r\n\r\nHardcover package\r\n\r\nPublished in English\r\n\r\nCover price: 45,00 Euro (VAT included)\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Promises to keep and promises kept \u00a0 \u00a0 With a title that invites you to imagine even before you’ve flipped through the book’s pages, Max Pam’s album, a compendium of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7834,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[484,445,483,452,482,451,485,464,465,486,467,466,468],"class_list":["post-5674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-post-blog-fr","tag-gianni-giulianelli","tag-lartiere","tag-lartiere-bookshop","tag-lartiere-collection","tag-larry-fink","tag-laura-serani","tag-limited-edition-photobook","tag-max-pam","tag-max-pam-book","tag-max-pam-libro","tag-max-pam-livre","tag-max-pam-photography","tag-max-pam-superturist"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t