This album is the most comprehensive publication on photographer Andrejs Grants’ work after the 2002 Neputns edition “Andrejs Grants. Photographs”.
The new album consists of five chapters or five visual stories focusing on the themes which the author has been exploring all through his creative work: “Around Latvia”, “Colleagues, friends, acquaintances”, “Double portraits”, “Travel notes” and “Impressions”. The subjects of Grants’ black and white photographs have always been Latvian countryside and small towns, the people he has met, nature impressions, the passing instants of existence.
Grants' photographs halt moments chosen by serendipity, transforming simple scenes of reality into messages about the irreal dimension of the face of everyday life. About the mystery behind the age we live through. A charismatic teacher, he has opened up several generations of Latvia's young photographers to a special ritual of thinking.
Laima Slava
The bilingual (Latvian and English) album comprises texts by philosopher Kārlis Vērpe and poet Artis Ostups, as well as the student of Grants’, Ieva Raudsepa’s text “Five Things”, reflecting on Andrejs Grants ideas about photography.
.. in the course of regarding the images by Grants and his fellows, one can gradually perceive the character of this lost experience and the aspects of it that are so absorbing. In Grants’ case, this definitely constitutes persistence: there is a conceptual image which grows and matures slowly, resting firmly in one’s consciousness. And this is certainly not a characteristic feature of Western art photography from the second half of the 20th century, once so avidly sought after. Here I mean the kind of time that is unpretentiously charged with sacredness and that is enigmatic and slow. Moreover, these are conceptual images that stay in one’s memory – in contrast to the great mass of visual information that nowadays rushes through it like an express train, never to return.
Kārlis Vērpe
The album includes Andrejs Grants’ creative biography, as well as lists of significant exhibitions and bibliography.