Else

The tough part was to make it happen. Now, comes the pleasure of carrying on with it. Since you are holding in your hands the second issue of ELSE, we can indeed say that it does exist. It is a magazine with its biannual periodicity; it is the Musée de l’Elysée’s strange magazine; the Swiss magazine for photography, for the other photography. Even more surprising, this new issue of ELSE reasserts the possibility of an encounter between various genres, artistic and vernacular, and that of a dialogue between eras, between past and contemporary. And should culprits be designated, fingers should then be pointed at artists who, as in the case of Brigitte Zieger, Martin Crawl or Luciano Rigolini, take hold, divert and appropriate images for themselves. So to make sense of all that, both the rigor of the archivist and the precision of the librarian had to be convened. It was all about sorting, distributing, grouping, putting in order, listing, cataloguing, classifying, categorizing. So the team at ELSE went on with all of that, wholeheartedly, even with humor, at times. So what is there to be found in this issue? Some photographic reminiscence: with an attempt to produce a composite image of a photographer’s body of work, with exquisite shooters, or with a typology of soccer; photosculptures collected by one of photography’s great Lady; found photographs - but not just anywhere! - in an American garage, in Thailand with a King or at the police’s photographer. Images within images, obsessive series - of course! - staged, or interpreted by a medium, of which we know that they did appeal to Brancusi. Icing on the magazine, there is even Doisneau, so unexpected that he could even one day end up in Richard Prince’s collection!

Sam Stourdzé

Available in Naville Kiosks (CH) and at Elysée bookshop (see our online bookshop).