The Time Before That

'The Time Before That' is a partly hand-made artist's book, produced in a small edition of ten.

The book was made in collaboration with the artist Bada Song to accompany Paul O'Kane's work in the Jerwood Space show 'For The Sake of the Image' (2010), curated by Suki Chan.

In 'The Time Before That' O'Kane reprinted a set of photographs, taken c.1980 during a time shortly before he learned that his father was terminally ill. He writes:

"I had often thought of that particular time as one of relative innocence, before I knew how hard life and death could hurt and divert. As I have sometimes believed that photography (or my photography) can transmit psychological conditions I was interested in whether this set of poorly maintained, rather scratched and grubby (30 year-old) slides retained any real sense of who and how I was at that time.

I was also interested in the way that I was able to make no evaluative judgement or selection but to simply include the contents of a little box of slide unified and valued only for their moment of coming into being.

In making the book with these distressed images I was also drawn into a critique of established values about photography e.g. as clean, technically able, new, current etc.

I was also struck by the impersonal distance between me and these aging images, an impersonality that photography already introduces through its mechanical means but which was here exacerbated or reinforced by the passing of time. (After Marcel Duchamp of course, impersonality in art might be as sought-after as various modes of expressionism were prior to Duchamp.)"
(Source: http://okpaul.com/work/the-time-before-that/)

The book is completed with two short, written reflections on these matters, referring to the work of Craigie Horsfield and John Coplans, and begins with a quote from Jean Baudrillard: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

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