1ère édition tirée à 800 exemplaires.
Two Men Arrive In a Village, le volume cinq de The Gould Collection associe quarante-neuf photographies de la photographe sud-africain Jo Ractliffe à l’histoire de l’écrivaine britannique Zadie Smith, Two Men Arrive in a Village.
La sélection de photographies de Jo Ractliffe dans ce volume a été réalisée entre 1985 et 2019, et provient de nombreux endroits: Afrique du Sud, du Grand Karoo aux provinces de Gauteng et Limpopo au Zimbabwe au nord, et du Cap occidental, en remontant la côte en Namibie et en Angola. Le dialogue entre les images de Ractliffe et la parabole de Zadie Smith est à la fois un commentaire direct et subtil sur l’injustice et les déséquilibres de pouvoir. Ensemble, ils s’efforcent de déplacer les récits familiers de violence et de déstabiliser les représentations clichées de l’Afrique au profit d’une interaction plus nuancée entre le réel et l’allégorique.
La Collection Gould est une série de livres qui a été créée pour honorer la mémoire de Christophe Crison, un collectionneur parisien de livres photo décédé prématurément en 2015 à l’âge de quarante-cinq ans. Au cours des cinq dernières années, depuis sa création, les éditeurs de la Collection Gould ont réuni un groupe diversifié de photographes et d’écrivains du monde entier. Une sensibilité thématique partagée sous-tend la sélection par les éditeurs des couples photographe-écrivain présentés dans chaque volume.
About Jo Racliffe:
Since the 1980s, Jo Ractliffe’s photographs have reflected her ongoing preoccupation with the South African landscape and the ways in which it figures in the country’s imaginary, particularly the violent legacies of apartheid. Alongside her own work, Ractliffe has taught within formal and informal contexts and has also initiated independent public projects that engage photography to reflect on history and memory in South Africa. Her recent exhibitions and books include a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 2020 and a monograph by Steidl. Ractliffe lives in Cape Town.
About Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2002), listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists (2003 and 2013), and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2017). She is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two Men Arrive in a Village, volume five of The Gould Collection pairs forty-nine photographs by South African photographer Jo Ractliffe with British writer Zadie Smith’s story Two Men Arrive in a Village.
The selection of photographs by Jo Ractliffe in this volume were made between 1985 and 2019, and come from many places: South Africa, from the Great Karoo to Gauteng and Limpopo provinces to Zimbabwe in the north, and from the Western Cape, up the coast to Namibia and Angola. The dialogue between Ractliffe’s images and Zadie Smith’s parable is simultaneously a forthright and subtle commentary on injustice and imbalances of power. Together, they work to displace familiar narratives of violence and unsettle clichéd depictions of Africa in favor of a more nuanced interplay between the real and allegorical.
The Gould Collection is a series of books that was created to honor the memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died prematurely in 2015 at the age of forty-five. Over the past five years, since its inception, The Gould Collection editors have brought together a diverse group of photographers and writers from around the world. A shared thematic sensibility underlies the editors’ selection of the photographer-writer pairings presented in each volume.
