See All This No. 22
Guest curated by Iwan Baan
See All This International B.V., Summer 2021
Paperback | 8 x 10-1/2 inches | 216 pages | Dutch/English | ISSN: 2468-3981 | €19.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The summer issue of See All This takes you on a trip around the world. A journey on paper, featuring some of the most hopeful locations in earth. Places where man and nature have always existed in a balance with one another, or where equilibrium has been restored. Composed by nomadic photographer Iwan Baan.
A suitcase and a child-buggy are perhaps the perfect symbols of his working life. The Dutch-born photographer Iwan Baan has spent the last fifteen years traveling all over the world to capture the places we call our own. National borders were mere lines in the sand; every city was a stop on the way to somewhere else.
As a travel expert, we entrusted Iwan Baan to be our guide for this journey on oar. More than the iconic places and buildings, Baan focuses on the people who move around and within them, stand next to them or live in their vicinity. Beneath the stones he photographs, there is always a beating heart.
Issue No. 22 of See All This can be purchased via seeallthis.com or via Idea Books.
dDAB COMMENTARY:
In May 2020, as part of the four-day Architecture & the Media conference organized by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, I had the chance to interview photographer Iwan Baan. Like the conference, the interview was done over Zoom, me in my kitchen and Baan in a room of his Amsterdam house just off the street. Not surprisingly, given the lockdown conditions and the famed peripatetic nature of the photographer, we talked a little bit about what he was doing with his days since he could not travel to distant places. In addition to working on his archive, Baan was gaining commissions to shoot buildings in the Netherlands, work he admitted he wouldn't have had time for under normal conditions.
Fast forward to May 2021, or shortly thereafter, and images of new buildings around the world photographed by Iwan Baan started to trickle into the architectural press, reflecting both the travel opportunities possible with COVID-19 vaccinations and the photographer's restlessness finding a release after so many months at home. The latest issue of See All This, the Dutch art magazine that bills itself as "your field researcher through the dazzling landscape of art," consists of a "world tour" through thirty such places — buildings, landscapes, villages, etc. — all photographed by Baan, some of them as recently as this year. One of the first things readers see in the issue, right before an interview with the photographer, is a photo of Baan with Nicole Ex and Sarah Knigge of See All This in the latter's Haarlem studio in May of this year: a subtly optimistic sign of a return to normalcy in human interactions.
The thirty numbered places in issue 22 are ordered geographically, keyed on a Dymaxion map similar to the first spread below. They start, logically, in the Netherlands, before hitting Italy and Spain, and then heading to Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia), Asia (India, Bangladesh, China, Japan), and the Americas (Chile, Mexico, United States, Canada). Some highlights include, in the order presented: Ensamble Studio's Ca'n Terra in Menorca, an unbelievable house in an abandoned quarry; the "Rock-Hewn Churches" in Lalibela, Ethiopia (third spread), dating to the twelfth century; a trio of places in Japan (Setouchi Islands, Ise Shrine [fourth spread], and Junye Ishigami's Art Biotop Water Garden); the house of Pedro Reyes and Carla Fernandez in Mexico City, which doubles as a lending library; and photos taken this year of Fritz Haeg's self-built home at Salmon Creek Farm in California.
Baan's photos fill many architecture books — quite a few I've reviewed on this blog — with just about all of them focusing on a specific building, a particular place or region, the work of an architect, or an architectural typology. There is not, to the best of my knowledge, a monographic book devoted to Iwan Baan, one that presents the myriad buildings, places, architects, and eras that he captures. As such, See All This No. 22 is valuable for collecting a wide variety of Baan's photographs — five continents worth, ranging from vernacular to contemporary, anonymous to starchitects, aerials to portraits. Although each of the thirty places are documented in just a handful of pages each, accompanied by short descriptions by writers, the expansive reach of the presentation makes up for this thrift. Fans of Baan will certainly be content with the photographer's tour of just a few places he's documented around the world.
SPREADS:
