“Moving between cultures in Britain and across national boundaries is common today. Yet our lived experience of the space that opens up between what we have known and what we find ourselves in, is frequently masked by an image culture of decisive moments constructed by the camera, whose homogeneity overrides these important differences. Oded Shimshon’s twenty large format black and white images completed between 1990 and 1993, entitled Set Pieces, also captures time. Yet unlike ‘slice of life photography’ they are not anecdotal. Instead they beckon us to wander on a plateau of open meanings, alert to analogies, calling them to attention at any given moment through our own history and direct apprehension. Aware of, but not disarmed by, photographic fact.”
A series of b/w photographs showing carefully placed objects (often raw materials or debris from buildings) on the same window-sill but always with a strikingly different window view; an old stone wall and rolling hills dotted with trees, a demolition site , the looming concrete cooling towers of a power plant, a broken fence in a rural landscape or a long-exposure shot of an empty bench on the waterside with sloping mountains in the distance and the vague ghostly outlines of people in the foreground enjoying the view; the objects, too, are different every time and appear to bear some resemblance to the view against which they are presented: slabs of stone for a mountain view, blocks of wood or branches for a forest view, and nothing for the empty bench and the ghost of tourists.
With an introductory text by Caryn Faure Walker, soft cover, 28,5 x 23,5 cm, 52 not numbered pages, Cardiff/Derby 1993
ISBN: 1-872771-07-6 (Ffotogallery)
ISBN: 0-901437-03-4 (University of Derby)
