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Diettes, Erika (Artist/Photographer) & Gonzalez, Miguel (Contributor) : Rio Abajo/drifting Away: The Deluxe Edition

Erika Diettes Studios, Bogota, Colombia, 2008

First Edition / First Printing. As New in No Dust Jacket, As Issued. 20 pages. Artist Book. Collection of tipped-in color transparencies. One of the most valuable photography books of our time. Limited Edition of 250 numbered and signed copies. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, of which there are many, mainly exhibition catalogs, all of them sourced from this Artist Book. There is no ISBN. The Limited Edition is now rare. An austerely elegant production by Erika Diettes: Oversize-volume format. Black cloth boards with titles printed on white stock paper that is pasted on the cover, as issued. Photographs by Erika Diettes. Essay by Miguel Gonzalez in both the Spanish original and felicitous English translation. Each original color transparency is hand-tipped into a pristine-white, thick card-stock paper to the highest standards. They must be seen and experienced in all their beauty, power, and sheer innovativeness in their use of the book format. Without DJ, as issued. Presents, in its Limited Edition collectible format, Erika Diettes' "Rio Abajo/Drifting Away". A luminous sequence of photographs that Diettes originally produced on transparent 60 X 35.5 inch (5 X 2 feet) life-size glass. How many photographs have you seen printed on glass or transparency (which means that they have no "back" side, the images can be viewed on both sides) ? Not very many, if at all. In a stroke of brilliance, Diettes chose glass and transparency because they both evoke River and Water, Colombia's fluids, evocatively and powerfully, and in a way that the regular photographic print cannot. "The rivers of Colombia are the largest graveyards in the world, favored places to dispose of the victims of the country's civil war. Out of this tragedy, Erika Diettes has created a powerful body of work about loss and memory in her photographs of personal articles once owned by The Disappeared. Her work is in the Permanent Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among other major venues, and is exhibited alongside that of Christian Boltanski and Gordon Matta-Clark. Erika Diettes holds a Master's Degree in Anthropology and was recently selected as one of the leading 180 thinkers in Latin America" (Charles Guice). Like Boltanski's work, Diettes' imagery resonates precisely because she uses the most basic elements of a human life, in this case, the articles of clothing that were recovered from the bodies of people murdered in Colombia's unending armed conflict. As such, her work is a radical departure from the more elaborate, ritualistic, even fetishistic photography we generically associate with Latin America (she is, after all, an anthropologist/social thinker as well as an artist/photographer, of the first rank in both instances). An absolute "must-have" title for Erika Diettes collectors. This is a copy of the Limited Edition of 250 numbered and signed copies, blind-stamped and numbered as such on the Back Limitation Page. It is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen by Erika Diettes. Each original color transparency is blind-stamped on recto by the artist/photographer. This title is a great Artist Book. As far as we know, this is the only copy of the Limited Edition available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: The life-size glass prints have been acquired by museums and private collections for thousands of dollars apiece. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative, on a more intimate scale, of this masterpiece. A rare signed copy thus. 15 original color transparency prints. One of the most brilliant artist/photographers of our time. A flawless collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ERIKA DIETTES TITLES IN OUR CATALOG).

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