Flurina Rothenberger: I Love To Dress Like I Am Coming From Somewhere….

Few things are more delicious than the photo book, the way it fits in your hands and fills your eyes with images to surprise and delight. There is a sense of curiosity and wonder, with every turn of the page, not knowing what will lay beyond the scene we observe quietly. Photo books are a portal into other worlds, a way in which the photographer transport you from there here and now to the there and then. This skill is particularly evident in I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go by Flurina Rothenberger (Edition Patrick Frey), one of the most singularly charming books about Africa published this year.

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Rothenberger writes in the book’s introduction, “This book is a tribute to ordinary life. No spectacular observations or sensational incidents, just selected daily observations from countries in Africa I have worked or stayed in over the past ten years. These pictures are a modest personal selection of glimpses of Africa that cannot possible reflect the huge diversity of such a vast continent, comprising 55 independent countries and a correspondingly wide range of peoples, lifestyles, and cultures. Conflicting facts, opportunities, intentions and events often closely co-exist here, stitched together to form a multi-layered backdrop of daily life in Africa….

Rothenberger’s words speak to her photographs as well. Each image is a singular moment preserved in life’s every flowing river of experience. Because there are no captions, no context aside from the continent itself, we are looking at a multiplicity of facets of life throughout the land. The book is brilliantly edited and sequenced so that the aesthetic elements guide us from picture to picture like the rhythm of a song. There is something at one familiar and foreign in Rothenberger’s work that makes I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go a source of pleasure for the heart and the mind.


 

All images from I love to dress like I am coming from somewhere and I have a place to go, Flurina Rothenberger (Edition Patrick Frey).
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