Bruce Percy | Altiplano
Bruce Percy | Altiplano
The high plateau of South America
Released on 1st of November, 2018
300 standard copies
100 Slipcase editions
Sold out upon publication
Foreword by Paul Wakefield
This book contains 67 photographic plates from my journeys to the Altiplano regions of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile over a 9 year period.
The book also contains a number of essays on the subject of composition and of working with simplified landscapes. The book is introduced by Kathy Jarvis who has written a number of travel guides about the region, in order to set the context for the landscape and how it has been shaped by the people that live upon it.
The book is available in three variants, and is limited to a small print run of 310 copies.
Specifications
300mm x 300mm
Soft cover
108 pages
67 full colour plates
Edition of 200 copies
The Altiplano in Bruce Percy’s work is revealed here in all its raw wonder. A land almost stripped bare of flesh, bone-dry and unforgiving. But that harshness is redeemed by Perc’s almost exclusive use of a very delicate quality of light. A choice that softens the sharp jagged edges, giving the parched planes an ethereal aura. Colours wash and dissolve into each other, causing sky and water, and even salt and snow, to shimmer in limpid flat examples that disappear into far horizon lines. This luminous glow imbues the images with a dream-like nature.
A memory of somewhere one might have been. I don’t imagine stepping across one of his photographs to inhabit it, but of floating above those limitless tracts, often following the strong diagonal lines that traverse many of his images, and which, along with his conoidal shapes, are his most distinctive calligraphic marks. They are spartan and economical of space and line, not dwelling on detail, and that same sensitivity of light holds those forms firmly in place. Har light would cause fractures to such translucent surfaces.
The other impression I have, especially when looking at the sequence as a whole, is that of a rhythmical score embedded in the arrangement of images and, as in music, the rise and fall place out through colour and intensity of tone, creating a harmony in this restrained minimal composition
Paul Wakefield
(June 2018)