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The Earth Will Come To Laugh And Feast
Introduction by Louise Salter / Photographer Roger Ballen
Published by powerHouse Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast is a poetic journey through a carefully curated selection of internationally revered artist, Roger Ballen's photographs. Italian poet, Gabriele Tinti, reflects on Ballen’s images with original texts written in the form of elegies, prayers, and laments. The text is appears in both English and Italian.
The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain.
As Tinti says “This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen’s photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things."
The book evokes the strong bond between art and literature, and of ekphrastic writing that evokes images by highlighting hidden relationships and implied mysteries. The result is a moving collection of poems and short stories revealing the profound state of existence and the fate of our torment, the inevitability of suffering, and of our helplessness from pain.
As Tinti says “This partnership moves from the rubble, passes through cemeteries, sniffs out the signs of what has gone. Roger Ballen’s photos, my words, are a kind of defense against the terrible power of death. They are an accumulation of enthusiasm, injuries, obsessions. They are effigies composed to disturb the reader, to ambush the thought, the things."
Product Details
- Publisher: powerHouse Books (December 22, 2020)
- Length: 152 pages
- ISBN13: 9781576879481
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Raves and Reviews
"As you turn the pages of this book, you seem to have entered the House of the God of the Dead himself and to pass from room to room in his dark palace, meeting on your way the irreducible pain of the world visible with wings prevented from beating by the barbed wire of our human curse."
– Jean-Baptiste Gauvin, The Eye of Photography
“Evoking the strong connection between art and literature, the book reveals the inevitability of suffering, and of human helplessness from pain.”
– Constanza Falco Raez, Flaunt Magazine
“When moving from picture to picture in Ballen’s latest book, The Earth will Come to Laugh and Feast, one gets the sensation of touring an asylum, peering into padded rooms, each containing its own cacophony of crude drawings, odd symbolisms, and unsettling gesturing of human form.”
– Gregory Eddi Jones, LensCulture
“In an era in which statues are in fashion thanks to the iconoclastic fury of the inculturation of cancellation, Tinti le statues knows how to make them talk.”
– Massimiliano Perrotta, Huffpost
“Ballen and Tinti have a vision that encompasses a wide spectrum of what impinges upon us – things that are not so neat and tidy, stuff that can creep up on us in our dreams and nightmares. The contexts for many of the figures in the images are indicative of the parts of life that are not so predictable – “
– Gerhard Clausing, PhotoBook Journal
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): The Earth Will Come To Laugh And Feast Hardcover 9781576879481
