One of my other personalities wrote a book (in Dutch) and he needed a cover. The book is about time or lack of it, and a couple of persons that may or may not be the same person. It was about time he finished the book as well, took him 2 years for only 110 pages.
I have been known to be a sucker for watches. Now that I am older not so much anymore, my relation with ‘stuff’ is changing, as is only natural when you wise-up I guess, but I can still appreciate a beautiful timepiece and love photographing watches with my, similarly precision-engineered, Cambo Ultima.
The first person narrator in the book is a young woman who lives next to a deeply troubled young man. They are aptly named Kate and John (remember the Terminator from 1984?) (time and memories are already playing a big role here, as is literature).
Fortunately I had exactly the right photograph from an earlier assignment I did at the Fotoacademie. The damaged arm of a mannequin wearing a women’s timepiece. With the liquify tool in Photoshop I made the watch a bit fluid in all the right places so it would ‘stick out’ amongst other photographs and book covers. Something to hook onto in your mind. That maybe only registers after you glanced at it, which is exactly the way I like my work to stick.
Of course the fluidity of the watch hints at the ‘wrongness’ of watch-time as we perceive it. Oh, I am saying it wrong, we do not even perceive watch-time. Watch-time is nothing but a metric invented to put us into slots in order to ‘organize society’ better and have us maximize ‘productivity’, read: make material things and buy other material things, turning around money in an ever increasing whirl wind we’re quickly loosing grip on, computers starting to decide what we buy and when. Now you see, this photograph fits perfectly into the original series ‘Destroying consumer society’ it belongs to. Talk about circles. Or squiggly circles.
If you can read Dutch, you’re in luck. Buy the book.