Erol Gemma

Awarded

Erol Gemma

'In Medias Res' (diploma work)

Photography

Jury report

Picture encyclopaedia
The clas­si­cal en­cy­clopae­dia serves as a model for the work 'In Me­dias Res'. This thick book is a col­lec­tion of pic­tures of an­other kind, fol­low­ing the se­quence of colours from light to dark, start­ing with in­frared and end­ing with ul­tra­vi­o­let, rather than an al­pha­bet­i­cal or the­matic order. Erol Gemma, the au­thor of the book, looked on the in­ter­net for pic­tures that are out of copy­right, and col­lected them to­gether. The pic­to­r­ial sub­ject mat­ter con­tains sci­en­tific il­lus­tra­tions as well as im­ages re­lat­ing to cul­ture, art, so­ci­ety and his­tory. The pic­to­r­ial qual­ity ex­tends from pro­fes­sional pho­tographs to snap­shots taken with mo­bile phones. Erol Gemma cropped the im­ages, worked on their colour and im­posed the same hor­i­zon­tal for­mat on all of them. The book is clearly struc­tured, with four pho­tographs per dou­ble page. No cap­tions are sup­plied, the pic­tures con­vey all the in­for­ma­tion. It looks as though the pho­tog­ra­pher placed the im­ages ran­domly, as there is no vis­i­ble order. In re­al­ity, Erol Gemma com­posed each dou­ble page care­fully, en­sur­ing that no two pic­tures with the same sub­ject mat­ter are jux­ta­posed. Each dou­ble page tells its own story, and trig­gers as­so­ci­a­tions cre­ated by these sets of four. Through­out the book he has tried to cre­ate dy­namic ten­sion; he picks themes up, com­bines them in con­stantly new ways and thus sur­prises his view­ers. There is no way of telling what is com­ing on the next page. The pic­ture en­cy­clopae­dia has 1008 pages and con­tains 4024 dif­fer­ent pic­tures – no pic­ture ap­pears twice.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Biography

Erol Gemma
Born in
1980
Education
Photographer

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