Carl
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: 2015 - ongoing

Exhibition views from the Cortona on the Move Festival (Cortona, Italy, 2024) curated by Kublaiklan Collective and Paolo Woods.
Image credit: Matteo Losurdo/Kublaiklan