Ghost Witness
2020
$55.00
Ghost Witness by Marten Lange. First edition (2020). First impression. Large format paperback in new condition. Signed by Marten Lange to title page. No markings. This is a new book. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About Ghost Witness
China has a rich tradition of ghost stories and also supernatural beliefs. There are tales of ghosts that can shape shift, or turn into air, or pure darkness or light. In Ghost Witness, Mårten Lange tells the story of a country rushing towards the future with the past following silently behind. Like a spectre in the smog. In his time in China, Lange visited urban metropolises that have expanded rapidly in recent years. As a result of hyper accelerated growth and development. Walking through these megacities, Lange explores the bleeding edge between rationalised urban planning and also messy everyday lives.
Ghost Witness engages with the unique quality of light in the urban environment, where the sun filters through the polluted air as well as the vast arrays of LEDs twinkle in the rain. Revealing the world indirectly, like a mirror. The images in Ghost Witness inhabit and replicate the machine like rational logic of the grid to interrogate overlaps and fissures between architecture, technology, surveillance and also the future. Lange’s precise photographs often describe those fissures: indecipherable codes, broken windows, decay and entropy within the order of glass and steel. Suspended in a liminal state between constant construction and expansion, Lange questions what it means for humanity to dwell inside environments that are planned, designed and repeated, with little recourse for history, transition and change.
