Heidi Specker’s Re-prise is a reorchestration of Moï Wer’s draft design for the book Ci-Contre. It is a superimposed layering of time – an echo, a mirror of illusory images. After finishing his studies at the Bauhaus Dessau at the beginning of the 1930s, the Lithuanian photographer Moshe Raviv Vorobeichic (Moï Wer) went to Paris, where he produced a maquette with 110 black-and-white photographs on forty-one double pages. In the process, he experimented with a dynamic layout to allow the images to communicate with one another. Specker has used Ci-Contre as a template for her work, giving a contemporary feel to the pictures by adding light and colour in order to impart an alien quality to golden shoes, red puddles, or grey concrete. Some of the double spreads create the impression that one is looking at the streaming images of a film. “The way Ci-Contre manifests in Re-prise is a natural result of the editing process.” The book is published to coincide with the exhibition Reprise, jointly presented by the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Munich, which runs from 16 October 2015 until 6 March 2016.
Spector Books, 2016