12/04/2021
Photo taken by current FdA Photo student Lisa Erin Jones
‘Searching for Your Shadow’
A Photobook and Exhibition
by
Chris Rydlewski
Press Release
April 2021
Chris Rydlewski, a Bristol (UK) based photographer and lecturer (City of Bristol College) is publishing his second photobook, ‘Searching for your Shadow’, based on his mother’s home district in Paris – the 15th arrondissement. This is a personal exploration of a space embracing identity, history, memory and geography.
As a fifteen-year-old in 1967, he spent an unanticipated week in Paris, walking exploring, and observing. He has become aware that this was a pivotal week in his learning how to actively see. Later in life he became a photographer.
This work is based on the notion of the flâneur – walking meditatively, but immersively – a skill learnt in that week in 1967.
His work is heavily influenced by French, Nobel Prize winning, author, Patrick Modiano*, whose characters usually attempt, and fail, to make some sense of memories of the past. Rydlewski notes that this failure is implicit in their search, as it is in his. Further, the fragility of memory is thrown into relief by his experience of his mother’s struggles with dementia in the later years of her life.
Despite photographing in a busy city, Rydlewski eschews both the inclusion of people and also the visually dramatic, preferring the places to remain implicit – spaces where drama may (or may not) occur. He hopes that this sense of latency and ambiguity in the photograph encourages the viewer to linger with the image. As he says, “In my experience understanding is seldom immediate and is often cumulative”.
Preview of images: http://www.chrisrydlewski.co.uk/searching-for-your-shadow.html
‘Searching for your Shadow’ photobook is published in April 2021
Available to order for £25.00 + P&P from:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/search?q=photobook%20searching%20for%20your%20shadow
‘Searching for your Shadow’ exhibition and official book launch
Centrespace Gallery, Bristol
BS1 1EA
23rd – 28th April
(Friday – Wednesday)
11.00 a.m. – 7.00 p.m. daily
The exhibition is generously supported by City of Bristol College and The Imaging Warehouse.
Contact:
[email protected]
07773 319307
www.chrisrydlewski.co.uk
Notes for editors:
Please see attached project proposal, biography and ‘Afterword’ (by CR, from the photobook) and low-res** PDF of the book for further information.
Or please get in touch for further information.
** Press quality PDF is available on request. * Patrick Modiano: awarded Nobel prize for Literature 2014.
Books include:
‘The Search Warrant’ (published as ‘Dora Bruder’ in France)
‘Ring Roads’ (from which the title, ‘Searching for your Shadow’, is taken)
‘The Occupation Trilogy’: ‘La Place de l’ Etoile’, ‘The Night Watch’, ‘Ring Roads’
