Stomp

STOMP
Jon Carapiet

STOMP explores themes of photographic portraiture and ‘the gaze’ in the context of destruction, questioning how we connect and identify with the other.

The images were made in Europe, India and Egypt since 2014 and began as a personal response to the destruction in Bamiyan and Timbuktu, Palmyra and Aleppo. Such recent manifestations of fascism have 20th Century antecedents in the Holocaust and Armenian genocide, but trace even further back in human consciousness. There is a long history of attempting to erase people from memory.

Stomp seeks to reach beyond a sense of despair and engage our shared humanity. It calls on powers of empathy
and universal understanding that survive any detachment from individual identity. Viewed through this lens the violence of human action becomes merely an acceleration of the disappearance wrought by time itself. As such the images are all the same: portraits of everyman and everywoman from every time and every place; pictures of us.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi – 13th century

Jon Carapiet is of Anglo-Armenian heritage and grew up in England, moving to New Zealand in 1992. His career includes a wide range of experience in photography, commercial market research, community advocacy, writing and broadcasting. His work explores humanitarian and global themes and the impact of technology. Since his first installation Headlines in 1994 which featured images of a screaming Princess Diana and Prince Charles appropriated from the tabloid media, Jon’s work has dealt with humanitarian and global themes as well as issues around portraiture, documentary photography, and the impact of technology on our ways of seeing. Other installations include istory (1995), Forgiveness (1998), STOMP (2017) and Rain Fade (2019).

RIM BOOKS

ISBN 978-0-9941306-4-8

March 2017

34pp, softcover, Singer sewn binding, A3 portrait
Text 160.0gsm Indigo Cocoon Offset, cover 250.0gsm Indigo Cocoon Offset, externally stitched.

RRP NZ $80 inc.GST

Add to cart


For all wholesale orders and requests info@rimbooks.com