ENTOURAGE: aka Physical Distance Theory, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Videogames
by Tim J. Veling
Self-published artist book from Otautahi Christchurch. Available from Rim Books in limited quantity.
Author of Red Bus Diary (2006), Veling began photographing his home city of Christchurch well before the 2010-11 quakes changed the CBD forever. Since then, for the full decade, he has amassed passionate and personal observations of the transformation and rebuild, publishing many photobooks and portfolios via www.placeintime.org, a multi-platform project facilitating and promoting documentary work about Christchurch and a cross-section of its people. Place in Time’s hope is that the work it facilitates might contribute towards an increased knowledge, perception, appreciation and tolerance of people and their surrounding environment.
Entourage is something of Veling’s 2020 diary – a city seen through the haze of lockdowns and pandemic; a kind of progress report of his relentless long-form projects. The hallucinatory projections of the future city promoted within architects’ draftings are anchored in the slithers of streetscapes where real people get on with their business. The photobook is accompanied by a separate text section – where Veling sensitively examines his practice, changing surroundings and, in a sense, the inside his own head.
“In other words, while I felt the billboards I photographed peddled a vision of material wealth and consumerism I struggled to relate to, after the last tiles are glued in place built environments inevitably take on a life mostly free of such abstract imaginings. At the end of the day, pragmatism dictates that the clean glass facades of office buildings become cluttered by computer and photocopier cables and the occasional wayward takeaway coffee cup will find itself lost and lodged between desk and window, what’s left of its contents dribbling slowly down the glass. Spaces, therefore, shift from existing in theory – in this case within an architectural draftsperson’s hermetic 3D-modelled world – to being real, lived-in places. As time passes the billboards fade; they accumulate bird shit and the scratchings or painted marks of taggers, then ultimately find their way into landfill. There, they are laid to rest in the company of waste accumulated during widespread demolition works ordered as part of the earthquake recovery. In the meantime, the city lives on and evolves.” Tim J. Veling
December 2020
60pp, Book 210×297 + booklet 180×235, full colour on Ricoh Digital Press on Silk Matt paper. 12pp insert on Munken Print paper. Artist Book – Edition of 50
RRP $35 inc. GST
Out of stock at Rim Books.
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