Peter Puklus, Handbook to the Stars

Home for the holidays, and finally going through some of the images from the past few months, I came across these installation shots of Hungarian photographer Peter Puklus’s book Handbook to the Stars. I love the way the Hungarian National Gallery presented his work, as part of  its World Models – Studio Experiments and Documents from Kondor to the Present Day exhibition, with the pages and images of multiple books overlapping to create a whole. In front, there was also a bound book that you could flip through, experiencing the placement of images next to each other or partial image in sequence.

This installation mirrors the structure of the work, and how Puklus presents it on his website as well: eschewing a linear narrative despite the book format, his collection of images were created in the studio and focus on objects in a deceptively simple way. These photographic experiments exploring objectness and light are simple, perhaps poetic, perhaps prosaic, but seemingly concrete representations on an inner world. Rather than creating an artful, artificial arrangement with studio props, Puklus shows the studio world they inhabit. Check out the images themselves on his website.