Unwired

Unwired holds two projects in one frame. For Unwired Landscapes, Jacqueline Hassink travelled to remote landscapes beyond network coverage — including locations on the Japanese island of Yakushima, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and in the volcanic desert of Iceland — and also to manufactured dead zones, among them a digital-detox hotel in Baden-Baden. For iPortrait she went underground, photographing passengers on the subways of New York, Paris, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo, each of them absorbed in a phone.

The contrast is the argument, and the book declines to moralise it. Silence without signal and crowds sealed inside private screens come out as two states of a single condition. Hatje Cantz published Unwired in 2018 in English: 318 pages, 131 photographs, with texts by Frits Gierstberg, Yudo Harada and Hassink herself. It accompanied an exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, that ran from 20 January to 6 May 2018.

Irma Boom designed the volume, which is a large object: 230 by 350 millimetres, softcover under an American dust jacket. The two bodies of work were made concurrently and are combined here in a single book rather than parcelled out across a catalogue, which is what gives the publication the character of a record of a working idea rather than a retrospective summary.

For a collection that follows how photography has described the networked present, the pairing is more useful than either series on its own. The texts contribute to a comparison between places outside network coverage and the public spaces where people remain constantly connected. What is being offered is, in effect, an exhibition catalogue that argues a position instead of surveying a career — a distinction worth something to anyone assembling books around attention, infrastructure and the withdrawal from both.

Unwired combines two concurrent projects from the Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink (*1966 in Enschede), both of which sharpen our eye for an increasingly digitally connected world. In Unwired Landscapes she has sought out places where it is impossible to build a network, where there is pure radio silence, so to speak—remote areas like the Japanese island of Yakushima, the Norwegian group of islands Svalbard known as Spitsbergen, or the uninhabitable volcanic desert of Iceland are caught by her lens, as are artificially created dead zones in urban spaces, such as a Digital Detox Hotel in Baden Baden.
Initially, her second project, iPortrait, seems to be the exact opposite of her first. In this project Hassink portrays people immersed in their smartphones in the subways of big cities such as New York, Paris, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo. Here, she reveals the other side of digital networking, which interferes with direct contact between human beings.

Exhibition: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam 20.1.–6.5.2018

Designed by: Irma Boom
Artist: Jacqueline Hassink
Texts by: Frits Gierstberg, Jacqueline Hassink, Yudo Harada
English
February 2018, 318 Pages , 131 Photos
softcover with American dust jacket
230mm x 350mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-4398-3

Publisher source ↗