In his second photobook, the Dutch documentary photographer and psychologist Jos Jansen turns his attention to the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, a research environment that presents itself as open yet remains heavily guarded. Published by the Eriskay Connection in 2012, *Entering the Black Box* records what happens when a photographer is granted sustained access to a place where the central activity is largely invisible to the eye. Jansen is credited as concept, photographer, author and editor; the book was designed by Rob van Hoesel, translated by Baxter Communications, and produced by Lecturis, with support from the High Tech Campus Eindhoven itself.
The book is organised around three properties of contemporary scientific research: scale, complexity and abstraction. Miniaturisation drives much of the work conducted there, increasingly at nano and even atomic levels, so that the phenomena under investigation can only be represented through mathematical formulas and scale models. Jansen proceeds associatively rather than illustratively, assembling fragments of a world that is at once alienating, fascinating and unfathomable. His stated questions — what exactly are these people doing, how does it cohere, what larger picture contains it — remain open, and the photographs are arranged to keep them open. He describes researchers and technology as almost amalgamating, technology sometimes appearing to assume the position of the human being.
The title comes from Bruno Latour’s term for the domain in which science becomes ‘dark’, a zone that cannot be pictured directly and can only be approached from its edges. That problem is the book’s real subject. Rather than pretending to expose the interior of high-tech research, Jansen works the boundary between what can be seen and what must be inferred.
Rob van Hoesel’s design gives the sequence a precise, cool structure: sixty-four pages in a softcover Otastar binding, 195 by 282 millimetres, with text in English. The first edition was limited to 500 copies. For collectors attentive to the photographic book as an argued object — where sequence, typography and physical proportion carry as much of the meaning as any single frame — this is a considered example of documentary practice turning its attention to the conditions of its own looking.
