Re-prise

2015

110 photos de Heïdi Specker
Spector Books

29,5 x 22 cm, 48 pages, 110 color images, English and German text
ISBN 9783959050647

Front and back cover of Re-prise: 110 photos de Heïdi Specker, 2015

I asked myself if and how it would be possible to use the impressive, exemplary concept of layout as a theme, without simply copying Ci-Contre or Moï Wer. Out of sheer respect for him, I was afraid of being trapped inside a framework of references. Nevertheless, the only response was to do precisely this. I made a copy, exactly reproducing the size of the images, their placement and reconstruct the typography of the title. Re-prise presents Ci-Contre once again, but through my images.

Heidi Specker

Pages of Re-prise: 110 photos de Heïdi Specker, Reproduction: Axel Balbini

On the occasion of the exhibition Re-Prise
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich DE
16 OCT 2015 – 6 MAR 2016

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 Re-Prise, 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

Pages of Re-Prise and Ci-Contre