Over boeken, literaire reflecties en het web van literatuur, door Niek de Greef. Werner Herzog, Paul Theroux, V.S. Naipaul en meer. Nederlandse en Engelstalige boeken.
4321 van Paul Auster is een verhaal over de schrijver van het verhaal, en drie andere mogelijke levens van de schrijver. Zo krijgen we viermaal het verhaal van Archi Ferguson de zoon van een naar de VS geëmigreerde
Joodse man. Geschreven in een meeslepende vorm van enorm lange zinnen, die zich van begin tot eind vullen met gedetailleerde beschrijvingen van de belevenissen en gedachtespinselen van Archie, met name tijdens de roerige jaren 60, waarvan je aan het eind vaak niet meer weet hoe ze aan het begin zijn begonnen maar die toch blijven boeien en je door deze dikke pil slepen.
Het laatste hoofdstuk vat het hele boek zelf het beste samen. Denkbare levens.
A guy called Robin Williams (not thé Robin Williams) wrote The Non-Designer’s Design Book. The book helps non-designer’s understand what is important in design.
There are four guiding principles of design:
Proximity, meaning: put stuff together that belongs together.
Alignment: elements should be (visually) connected to something else, consistently. Use lines to draw connections (or to identify lack of connections). Centered alignment should be avoided, and only applied very consciously.
Repetition: tells us to repeat elements to unify and strengthen a piece. Take a repetitive element for example and repeat it to emphasize it’s importance. But don’t overdo it.
Contrast: draw attention by making things (more) different. If things are not the same, do not make them look the same.
The Fifth Principle: Don’t Be A Wimp. Meaning: do not be afraid to be different.
Colors
The color wheel: primary colors + others. Complementary colors. Triads: at a third of the wheel. Shades and Taints: add black resp white to the color. Warm/cool colors have red resp blue in them.
CYMK vs RGB: color schemes for printer resp monitor.
Typography
The second half of the book is a treatment on Typography. When to use quotes, which quotes, spaces, apostrophes, dashes, underlining (never!).
Typographic types & relationships. Concordant: one type family without much variety. Can be strong. Conflicting: similar types but not the same. Avoid. Contrasting: clearly distinct. Complementing. Can be strong when done well.
Types of types: Old style, Modern, Slab serif, Sans serif, Script, Decorative. Type contrasts: size, weight, structure, form, direction, color.
Basic approach to improve design: – start with a focal point, with contrast – group the information, create proximity, strong alignment – create repetition – have strong contrasts
The famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Great, apart from it’s occasional religious dwellings. I do not mean the fact that Covey himself is religious, but the instances where he loses factuality and swerves into wishy washy paragraphs.
Be pro-active.
Begin with the end in mind. How you want to be remembered. Personal mission statement. What roles you have and how to fulfill those.
First things first. Quadrant Import / Not important versus Urgent / Not Urgent.We tend to focus on the Urgent side (whether important or not) but we forget the not so urgent but important part (the Quadrant II as Covey calls it). Become a Quadrant II oriented person.
Think Win-Win. Quadrant Consideration slow / high versus Courage low/high. Make Emotional Bank account deposits. You can not just withdraw from the Emotional Bank account.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Diagnose before prescribing.
Ik lees Blinde Wilg, Slapende Vrouw uit. Gisteren dan. Een eenzame student tijdens het einde van zijn middelbare school en zijn studententijd. Verwondert zich om de wereld, maar legt zich daarbij neer. Op een manier die alleen bij Murakami mogelijk is. Verhalen die teruggrijpen naar romans, de tijd van de student op de universiteitscampus, een vriendin die wordt opgenomen in een kliniek, een vakantie in Hawaï. Het is een zachte wervelwind en laat zich alleen maar lezen. En goed ook.
Photographs, as Hans Aarsman prefers them, are not taken to make a nice picture but only because they attract the photographer’s attention and because he just feels like taking a picture of them. Photo Libretto by Eddy Posthuma de Boer is full of it.
Or as Garry Winogrand said:
Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
Discovering Eddy Posthuma de Boer
I knew Eddy Posthuma de Boer primarily as the photographer who had taken the pictures in Cees Nooteboom’s travel books. His images accompanied Nooteboom’s literary wanderings through Europe and beyond, creating a visual counterpoint to the writer’s observations. But Photo Libretto revealed a different side of Posthuma de Boer, one less concerned with illustrating a narrative and more focused on pure visual discovery.
Photo Libretto was published as a photography calendar, offering one image for each day of the year. This format gives the work an intimate, daily rhythm. Rather than presenting a single coherent project, Posthuma de Boer organized his images into thematic collections that reveal his recurring fascinations and visual obsessions.
The Art of Noticing
Here and there, the images display a wit reminiscent of Elliott Erwitt: black-and-white dalmatians crossing at a zebra crossing, creating an accidental visual rhyme. An Arab who appears to be trying to fix an overturned car, fiddling with the engine with one hand, but a few meters away lies the rear axle, completely detached. A massive pile of crushed car blocks, compressed into perfect metal cubes, speaking to the lifecycle of automobiles.
The book is organized around themes, or rather, collections of related observations. There are texts on signs and storefronts with spelling mistakes – the kind of vernacular typography that most people walk past without noticing. Means of transportation appear frequently: French cars slowly rotting and becoming part of the French landscape, their rust and decay creating unintentional sculptures.
People reading newspapers make multiple appearances, caught in moments of absorption. Companies and products bearing the name Victoria form another collection, turning a simple proper name into a typological study. It’s this kind of obsessive attention to patterns that makes the work compelling.
Cees Nooteboom, photo Eddy Posthuma de Boer
Ordinary Things, Extraordinary Images
The most admirable pictures capture everyday things rendered without further context, producing unexpectedly remarkable images. A neat little plant table constructed entirely from Pepsi crates, a moment of folk design that could have come from an Eggleston photograph. The ingenuity of making do with what’s available, elevated through photographic attention.
Marte Röling’s Star Fighter aircraft appears, incongruous and powerful. A hotel reception desk in Marseille drowns in an overwhelming abundance of floral wallpaper and carpet patterns. Maximalist interior design that borders on the surreal. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, photographed with the camera tilted so that the tower appears straight while the surrounding world tilts askew, a visual joke that upends our expectations.
Most memorably, a hotel room features a bathtub positioned in the middle of the space, surrounded by a shower curtain like an island of privacy in an otherwise open room. Only possible in Belgium, I thought when I saw it. These are the kinds of vernacular oddities that Posthuma de Boer sought out, or simply noticed when they appeared.
The Philosophy Behind the Images
What ties these diverse images together is Posthuma de Boer’s approach to photography – taking pictures not because they’re obviously beautiful or important, but simply because something catches his eye. It’s photography driven by curiosity rather than ambition, by the pleasure of looking rather than the need to make a statement.
This connects directly to what Hans Aarsman advocates: photography as a practice of attention, of noticing what’s already there rather than constructing elaborate scenarios. It’s democratic in its gaze, finding equal interest in a damaged car, a spelling mistake, or an improvised piece of furniture.
Photo Libretto reminds us that the world is already full of remarkable images – you just need to pay attention and be ready with a camera. The joy Posthuma de Boer found in this practice comes through in every page of this calendar, making each day’s image a small gift of visual observation.
For anyone interested in Dutch photography, vernacular culture, or the art of everyday observation, Photo Libretto remains a treasure worth seeking out.
