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By Amanda Marchand.
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Photographs by Amanda Marchand
“Three windows in an old schoolhouse.
Four, if you count the camera as a window too.”
Sentimentality is an inherent attribute of photography. By depending of impressions based on prior experiences, photography allows (maybe even encourages) a nostalgic and romanticized view of our personal and shared histories. This sentimental nature can be either an asset or a trap. When looking back at the work of Clarence White or Heinrich Kühn, it is easy to dismiss them as excessively romantic and saccharine. And yet even relentless, aggressive photographers like Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand have sentimental streaks.
Amanda Marchand’s photobook, Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again, unapologetically embraces photography’s proclivity for sentimentality. The work is tempered by a deep longing, subtle visual poetics, and a feeling of detachment as we watch time pass through the camera. Marchand, a Canadian photographer, made the pictures in Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again over just a few months. The photographs are all of just three windows in an old schoolhouse in Finland, made deep in winter when the days are short and the light rich, but elusive.
Brian Arnold is a photographer and writer based in Ithaca, NY, where he works as an Indonesian language translator for the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University. He has published two books on photography, Alternate Processes in Photography: Technique, History, and Creative Potential (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Identity Crisis: Reflections on Public and Private and Life in Contemporary Javanese Photography (Afterhours Books/Johnson Museum of Art, 2017). Brian has two more books due for release in 2021, A History of Photography in Indonesia: Essays on Photography from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age (Afterhours Books) and From Out of Darkness (Catfish Books).
— Amanda Marchand
Sentimentality is an inherent attribute of photography. By depending of impressions based on prior experiences, photography allows (maybe even encourages) a nostalgic and romanticized view of our personal and shared histories. This sentimental nature can be either an asset or a trap. When looking back at the work of Clarence White or Heinrich Kühn, it is easy to dismiss them as excessively romantic and saccharine. And yet even relentless, aggressive photographers like Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand have sentimental streaks.
Amanda Marchand’s photobook, Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again, unapologetically embraces photography’s proclivity for sentimentality. The work is tempered by a deep longing, subtle visual poetics, and a feeling of detachment as we watch time pass through the camera. Marchand, a Canadian photographer, made the pictures in Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again over just a few months. The photographs are all of just three windows in an old schoolhouse in Finland, made deep in winter when the days are short and the light rich, but elusive.
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Designed and printed by Datz Press in Seoul, South Korea, the book is beautifully conceived. Printed in a small edition, Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again is produced with great care and sensitivity, helping to substantiate the poetic and romantic narrative in Marchand’s pictures. The book begins with the dust jacket; removing the jacket and seeing its underside reveals what at first glance appears as free-verse poetry, each line offering short impressions on the passage of time. A closer look, however, reveals that interspersed within the lines of verse are small, light grey squares. As you enter the book, it becomes clear that these grey squares map out the pictures spread across the pages of the book, and the poem is really a list of titles or descriptions of the photographs.
This design strategy, keeping some of the content and intent of the book hidden from view, perfectly describes and anticipates the pictures found inside. All of Marchand’s pictures feel like something is hidden, like what she really photographed is an internal landscape, rather than the one described by the camera. She invites the viewer into a romantic, nostalgic reverie in which we watch time evaporate, leaving us longing for something much more concrete. Marchand asks the viewer to look beyond the pictures, to recognize that the gestures and feelings driving the photographs offer the real substance of the book.
By focusing on windows, Marchand has chosen an obvious metaphor, but again, the design and photographic strategies help elevate the book beyond simple cliches. The page spreads are staggered, some with a single photograph of a window printed full-page, others with 6 or more pictures interspersed across the spread. Some are gatefolds that open to show much larger spreads of pictures, and still others where photographs hinged and floating on the surface of the paper with little bits of words and secrets printed beneath. At times the pictures look at the world beyond the windows, at other times the way the windows refract light on the interior walls. The combined effect is two-fold; each spread feels like a contained passage of verse or a poem itself, and yet, collectively, they render a broader passage of time, sustaining a more complex narrative about photography and personal experience.
True to its title, each copy of Nothing Will Ever Be the Same is unique. One page towards the back of the book has a print tipped in, and no two of these are the same. Limited to just 300 copies, reading Nothing Will Ever Be the Same feels like an intimate experience.
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True to its title, each copy of Nothing Will Ever Be the Same is unique. One page towards the back of the book has a print tipped in, and no two of these are the same. Limited to just 300 copies, reading Nothing Will Ever Be the Same feels like an intimate experience.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
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