photographic projects

• les très riches heures de herman de vries
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  fig. 1 les très riches heures de herman de vries, 1981 
  les très riches heures de herman de vries (1981) was inspired, conceptually, by the beautiful Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The Limbourg brothers' supreme masterpiece of the genre (created between 1411 and 1416 and containing 131 exquisite miniatures) conformed to the conventional form of the book of hours, being a prayer book in which the canonical hours (horae), the Little Office of the Virgin, a calendar of months with appropriate zodiac maps and signs, etc., were elaborately illuminated and illustrated for the delectation of the very rich patron who commissioned it. In the innovative realism of the early fifteenth-century international Gothic, the calendar miniatures vividly depict with much lively detail, the Duke's extensive domains, in which his powerful chateaux rule over productive agricultural landscapes of farms, vineyards, pastures and hunting forests, and over his feudal subjects at their seasonal labours.
• de vries's heures are, conversely, those of a single summer day spent by the artist - the experiencing subject - in the woods near Eschenau: the work consists of 131 black and white photographs taken of whatever detail of the life around him has caught his attention, a fall of sunlight through leaves, grass stems, a single leaf half-eaten by insects, foliage, the bark of a tree. Without regard to any order of devotions or any systematic relation to the passing of the hours, every exposure catches a trace of the actual light of the day on the reality of a single moment. The picturesque and idealised celebration of ordered hegemony and toiling servitude within a religious context is replaced by the haphazard ceremony of being and of what befalls. What is courtly, complicated and richly wrought is re-figured as democratic, simple and immediate. the meadow, so small in compass, so unproductive and marginal a terrain as seen by the modern farmer, is an image of another aspect of man's estate, that of his place in the living, growing world experienced as a vital complexity of interdependencies. It is a place set aside for meditation and recreation.
• There is in this contrast so subtly proposed by de vries's evocation of the Très Riches Heures, a deeper political implication. The picturesque, as the word implies, entails the viewing of the world as a picture, its ordering to a preconceived idea or ideal. It implies the separation of the subiective eye from the objective world as seen, and the primacy of the eye and mind over the secondary reality of the world as seen by an eye that is informed by particular ethical and ideological preconceptions. It depicts what it desires to project. The Limbourgs were commissioned to represent the Duke's lands as the very picture of social and political harmony and prosperity in an age of brutal warfare and political turmoil. Each calendar image is, then, in the words of art historians Hugh Honour and John Fleming, 'a view not only of but, as it were, from the castle, both literally and metaphorically looking down on the peasants.' That this pre-ordained order of things is to be regarded as fixed and universal is indicated by the canopy of stars and the zodiac signs in the lunettes above each calendar image: it is the heavenly constellations that determine what obtains below them on earth.
• de vries's conversion of the 'hours' from the objectively ordained ordering of the ritualistic horae of the devotional day, within the calendric turn of the seasons, to the subjective zufall ('what befalls') experience of what occurs in real time, events shaped by chance, change and circumstance, is profoundly witty. de vries's 'hours' consist of moments experienced in the subjective here and now, with the world as a presence manifest in minute particulars. (Significantly, there is only one border in the whole of the Duke's prayer book in which the depiction of individual flowers is naturalistically detailed.) In de vries's own très riches heures it is the broader view, the general prospect the landscape as an ideal, that are absent. Reality, to paraphrase Flaubert is in the detail.
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