Archipelago
Matthew Porter
MACK
Hardcover
132 pages
240×280 mm
2015
ISBN: 978-1-91016-4303
Archipelago is a journey into an interior, upriver, towards an enigmatic hinterland. At any one instance, Matthew Porter sets up correlations between disparate images, configured on each page like islands in an archipelago, clusters which form their own, indigenous subjects. Short texts, placed at intervals, reveal the connective tissue binding varied subjects – Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War, the Hawaiian Island of Kaua’i and Hollywood. What interests Porter is the legacy of the photographic image, and its capacity to reach across history, to make intelligible to us what we already know, or, encountered at the right moment, that which we could not otherwise know.
“Porter’s stills function like portals”, writes Lindsay Caplan, “obliquely suggestive of historical events, modernist styles, and codified genres, sometimes all at the same time… this very contemporary condition in which knowing too much and knowing too little invoke the same visceral state”.
Matthew Porter (b.1975, Pennsylvania) received his BA from Bard College in 1998 and his MFA from Bard-ICP in 2006.
www.matthewporterphoto.com
Mack is an art and photography publishing house based in London, working with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions – releasing between 20-25 books per year.
