For the creation of Entre Entree, Stephan Keppel spent one year in Paris and its suburbs, reproducing the endless variations of the city’s surfaces with his set of printers, cameras and partly found paper stocks. His photographic work originates from marginal phenomena related to architecture, interiors and suburbs: he collects and arranges images and objects, engaging them in a long-term relationship that involves photography, reproduction and other supporting media. Entre Entree is a project about the Parisian suburbs and the city’s ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, in which Keppel conceives a fragmented and claustrophobic urban landscape. That landscape is manifested through numerous black-and-white images of concrete facades, vegetation, and the textures, shapes and materials that together form the entity of the city.
The book was published by Fw:Books in 2014: 21 by 29 centimeters, 208 pages, monochrome, paperback, in English, with design by Hans Gremmen with Stephan Keppel. The publisher describes Entre Entree as a very dense, attractive, but at the same time uncanny publication, and as a highlight in Keppel’s ongoing research on public space, urban structures and reproduction. This experimental approach gives a unique perspective on a city that has over the years so often been visually celebrated.
The publisher records that Entre Entree was named one of The 15 Best Dutch Photobooks 2014 by De Volkskrant, among Photo-eye’s Best Books of 2014, among the Best of 2014 by Photobookstore Magazine, and among the Ten Best Artbooks 2014 by Brooklyn Rail. A review appeared in Photo-eye; Great Leap Sideways also responded to the book.
For a reader, the interest lies in seeing a familiar city become unfamiliar through reproduction. Cameras, printers and paper each intervene between a surface and its appearance on the page. Keppel makes that chain of transformations central to the work: the city is encountered through fragments and textures rather than through a sequence of recognizable destinations. The publication allows those fragments to be compared at a pace different from walking through the streets.
