Sites & Signs

Usually, it gets on my nerves when I do not know what I'm looking at. And, I've never really understood why photography books come without captions or why I have to go the very end of the book in order to learn what my eyes are registering. Yet sometimes it does not really matter to have more information than what can be seen on the photograph. I'm not saying that it does not matter at all, I'm only saying it is not necessarily essential information. This was my experience with the photographs in George Aerni's „Sites & Signs“.

Copyright @ Georg Aerni

I did not wonder what my eyes were showing me, I simply enjoyed the compositions, and the colours, and felt fascinated what they did to me - I felt entranced, and I felt calm.
And then, after quite some time, I asked myself where these photos were taken and learned that Georg Aerni had been pretty much all over the world - from Hong Kong to Mumbai to Flüelen, Bodio and the Glacier de Moiry.

Copyright @ Georg Aerni

Henry James proposed asking of art (I'm never sure whether photography is art but, for the sake of argument, let's say it is): What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing? Needless to say, I can only guess what Georg Aerni was trying to do - and I haven't the foggiest idea. From Nadine Olonetzky I learn that Aerni's theme is "the photographic examinations of the topography of cities, agglomerations, and human-designed landscapes". Although a bit vague, that makes sense to me. So, was it worth doing? Since I very much like "Aerni's eye" - absolutely!

Copyright @ Georg Aerni

What I felt to be rather peculiar was that there aren't any people to see on these photographs - except on the Mumbai pics. What's even more peculiar is that only so few people are to be seen on these Mumbai pics for it is surely the masses of Indians that make Indian cities, well, so Indian. Yet, and quite obviously so, this book isn't about portraying life in the city of Mumbai (or Tokyo or Paris) but is, in the words of Stephan Berg, "a precise observation and surveying of reality until the point at which something foreign, artificial, staged, and unreal becomes apparent behind it."

There's a third text in this beautifully done tome that however - contrary to the two texts already mentioned - only marginally refers to the pictures shown: "Cultivated Deserts" by Moritz Küng, who compares Aerni's later city photographs with the works of J.G. Ballard. I'm a great fan of Ballard's works yet such an interpretation strikes me as rather far-fetched ... but then again: we always see in pictures what we want to see.

Georg Aerni
Sites & Signs
Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2011