Adam Jeppesen, Wake

Every now and then I'm revisiting some of the photography books and other items on my shelves here. This time it’s . . .

Adam Jeppesen has gone through a number of changes over the course of his career, and in a relatively short time. Originally a documentary film maker and cameraman for Danish Television he moved on through photography to arrive at where he is now: a multimedia artist working with print, sculpture and site-specific installations. He first came to my attention with the book I’m looking at here, Wake, published by Steidl in 2008. Jeppesen went on to publish another book, The Flatland Camp Project, which I would absolutely love to own (or even just to see in real life). That was a long-term landscape project through which he explored the materiality and impermanence of the photographic print as well as the unexpected beauty that comes from imperfection (wabi-sabi)... all things that interest me. Sadly it’s a prohibitively rare and expensive book for my budget. Which is a shame. 

Wake, however, is an exquisite little book and you can still find new or used copies from around €100. During his years of travelling on assignment Jeppesen had amassed a large quantity of personal work, shot during time off from production. In 2004 he made the decision to self-isolate for a few months in the backwoods of Finland, dedicating himself to the job of editing his images and putting them together in some kind of meaningful way… “just to see what came out”. His book Wake is the result of that self-enforced isolation. 

As the title suggests, the book accompanies us through a night-time, dream-time journey. There is no defined subject but the images flow together to create an overwhelming sense of absence, not only within the scene we’re looking at but also in our own transience as we move from one location to the next. Occasionally we are held for a moment by the curtains of a hotel room or guesthouse before heading out again into city nights and cold landscapes. Only the last two images suggest an awakening or a new day, although the absence remains.

For me this book shows how powerful the act of editing can be: the selection and placement of images, allowing them to work together, suggesting meaning while not going so far as to reveal that meaning. As Jeppesen said,  “I wanted to express something that lay below the surface of what you initially saw.” This is an idea I often hear photographers talk about, the desire to photograph something you can’t see, or that’s not physically there. For me, Wake is among the books that actually achieves it. 

Adam Jeppesen, Wake, Published by Steidl, 2008.