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.
