Bertrand Cavalier — Permanent Concern

Smartphone photographs of everyday things in the Netherlands, taken by Bertrand Cavalier in 2021 with the zoom pushed as far as it would go.

The subjects are ordinary: a plastic table, a brick wall spattered with paint, a girl's skipping rope. Enlarged to the limit of the phone and reproduced as monochrome laser prints, they reveal their own structure and start to look like foreign objects that break away from the order they first belonged to. Cavalier draws out several sides of urban planning, the unplanned among them. He treats the mishap as a quality, because it leaves room for people to use a city in their own personal way.

Pictures of the skipping rope return at regular intervals through the book, with runs of blank pages between them that slow the reading down. Before this he photographed city districts and brutalist buildings in black and white, in places marked by war and violence over the past few decades.

Born in France in 1989, Cavalier is an artist working in several media and based in Brussels. He published an earlier book with Fw:Books in 2020.

Spector Books, 2024. 120 pages, 41 black-and-white illustrations, open thread-sewn softcover with a screen-printed dust jacket, 20 x 27 cm. In English. Designed by Malin Gewinner with the artist.