FAIT by Sophie Ristelhueber

PRICE ON REQUEST.

A persistent feature of Ristelhueber’s work is her foregrounding of openly wounded surfaces (desert sands, concrete, skin, brick walls and blasted metal) that formed part of a battleground.

She photographed the Kuweiti desert in 1991. Unlike more conventional forms of war documentation (usually operating in media res and focussing on human damage in action) these images were taken 6 months after the end of the Gulf War and contain no bodies.

Ristelhueber describes the work as an attempt to state ‘how little we see’ as opposed to something that allows for easy identification. It’s often unclear if the camera is 20cm from the ground or 100m above it. The aerial views of trenches cut by soldiers into the desert could be mistaken for close-ups of patterns drawn in the sand by a fingertip. This ambiguity of scale is analogous to the uncertainty of the nature and proximity of the relation between the observer and observed, and the world to which they belong.

Whilst her work has been criticised for a lack of reflection on its political context, to me it seems to prefigure the methods of tracing mental and physical topographies in order to access and account for violence later used by the research institute Forensic Architecture. Like their investigative work, Fait is at once fact and fiction and suggestive of a reality structured more intricately than is adequately expressed by state-sanctioned military and moral dichotomies.

This is a rare first edition of the artist book made by Ristelhueber of 71 images and 2 extracts from Karl von Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Signed by the artist, hardback, and in good condition. Very slight creasing to spine and faint marks on the cover. 1992.