How is movement conveyed in photography? For a decade, photographer Carl Ander has collected photographs from sports and health instruction manuals to examine this question. The exhibition features an extensive collection of images – approximately 350 in total – sourced from these books, depicting various types of physical activity. Together they are assembled to form a photographic body atlas.
Title: Static Motion
Gallery: Centrum för Fotografi, Stockholm, Sweden
Curator: Kristyna Müller
Year: 2026
Gallery: Centrum för Fotografi, Stockholm, Sweden
Curator: Kristyna Müller
Year: 2026
Since 2015, Carl Ander has been collecting manuals illustrated with photographs on the topics of sports, health and self-help instructional books that aspire to teach anything from how to wrestle or ski, to how to stretch or massage.
In the series Static Motion, Ander presents selected photographs, pages or spreads from books without disclosing their accompanying text instructions; therefore there is no longer any explanation regarding how to interpret these images. The logic underpinning their existence is obscured.
By separating these instructional photographs from their original context, they lose their ability to teach as originally intended. Nonetheless, this does not completely negate their ability to teach. Collectively, these images can now serve as a manual on how to photograph the body in motion.
The photographs are frequently accompanied by illustrations. Arrows and other graphical elements have been drawn on top of the photographs to indicate the direction of movement. Interventions such as these suggest that a single frame alone is unable to indicate motion and thus fulfill its instructional task.
Title: Static Motion
Year: 2024
Exhibition views from the Cortona on the Move Festival (Cortona, Italy, 2024) curated by Kublaiklan Collective and Paolo Woods.
Image credit: Matteo Losurdo/Kublaiklan
Just like a car crash – photographs (accidents) stop the progress of movement and time. In the aftermath, photographs become witnesses of what has happened. We use them to understand the logic to what has occured. However, photographys indexicality is not an absolute one. Can we be sure of what we have in front of us?
The series Necessities (see full series here) was part of the exhibition “Three Apprentices” shown in Bosco Chiesanouva and Verona at Fonderia 20.9. The show also included work by Eleonora Agostini and Yana Wernicke.
Year: 2022 and 2023
Curator: Federico Clavarino and SÅM (Francesco Biasi, Chiara Bandino, Ana Blagojevic)
Curator: Federico Clavarino and SÅM (Francesco Biasi, Chiara Bandino, Ana Blagojevic)
Participation in the group show POST-POSTMODERNISM curated by ILL-STUDIO.
