TOPOGRAPHICS
2 total works
Swiss photographer Jean Mohr has travelled the globe documenting the lives of the dispossessed, the marginalized and the overlooked for over forty years. In 1996, while convalescing from a serious operation in the mountains near Geneva known locally as 'The Edge of the World', Mohr realized that he had come close to the edge of his own existence. Having recovered, he was inspired to revisit places that had struck him as being at the edge of the world in the course of his long career, places which were remote in terms of both common experience and geographical location. Each set of photographs in this book 'from the edge' is introduced by a short text written by Mohr himself. Spanning 40 years, his photographs take us to such disparate venues as Romania, Lapland, Pakistan, Greece, Algeria and Nicaragua. Mohr's longstanding collaborator John Berger describes his life in a portrait that sheds particular light on the theme of this book.
"Robinson in Space" is a visual, satirical record of a journey made by a fictional character called Robinson, narrated by his travelling companion and researcher, through the increasingly unknown space of present-day England. Robinson quotes Oscar Wilde: 'It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible'. His assumptions about economic failure, especially in manufacturing industry, are gradually challenged by the discovery of an industrial economy that employs few people but still generates most of the wealth of the fifth-largest economy in the world. "Robinson in Space" incorporates material from the award-winning film of the same name that was released just before the British 1997 General Election. The book juxtaposes the narrative and over 200 intriguing, strange-yet-familiar images from the film to take the reader on a fascinating journey through the landscapes of present-day England.