Among the idioms English hands us, “falling” is unusually double-edged: a fall from grace, falling asleep, falling pregnant, falling in line, falling apart—comic and tragic at once, bound up with loss and with wilful abandon. Gabby Laurent’s Falling, published by Loose Joints in 2021, takes that vocabulary as its subject and, more unusually, as its method. The book reflects on bereavement and new life, and the performed choreography at its centre lets the artist’s body repeatedly give way to gravity, building a space in which time, fate and circumstance can be contemplated rather than merely described.
The photographs work by contradiction. If a fall is by definition accidental, Laurent’s falls are staged, which means the camera records not a loss of control but its deliberate surrender. The staging is legible: a body rising precariously from starting blocks while heavily pregnant; socks slipping on the stairs; a bicycle going down; elsewhere, a smaller figure in pure free-fall, suspended in grain and blur and detached from the landscape. The book’s sequences reverse, intermesh, repeat and contradict these moments in a staccato rhythm, producing something like a Muybridge-esque procession of emotions and states of mind—each gesture drawing the same involuntary response a passer-by gives when a stranger falls in the street.
The idiomatic weight of the word matters here. Falling carries a suggestion of failure, of insufficient composure, of behaviour popularly coded as unwomanly. Laurent draws on feminist and performative art traditions in working against that coding, and the falls accumulate as a gesture of defiance as much as an admission of helplessness: the artist picks herself up and dusts herself off.
The book is a substantial object—144 pages, 72 colour and duotone plates, at 155 × 232 mm, in an OTA-bound debossed softcover—with the sequence and the binding both serving the staccato editing. An accompanying poster edition is also available, and signed copies ship from the UK only. For a collector, its interest lies less in any claim to rarity than in the coherence of the whole: a sustained performance project, tightly sequenced and carefully designed, that treats a single everyday verb with analytical precision and gives it back to us as a condition of living.
