28|02|2025

I’m back with another moment (small detail) from the Jap Sam catalogue that caught my eye.

This week, I was looking through Ivory Black, Deep Orange Yellow, a book that features the work of painter and photographer Carla Klein.

To be perfectly honest, what initially drew me to Klein’s book was the PVC dust jacket—I’m a sucker for orange-reds, and the translucence of the plastic gives it a faded look that was irresistible—but I stuck around for the art and the truly unique process by which Klein creates it.

The book describes how Klein chooses non-spaces, liminal settings that we’d usually ignore, and uses photography and oil paint to not only depict what’s seen but also how it’s seen.

She does not simply replicate the subject of her photographs but also captures the ‘imperfections’ in the pictures themselves:

“Hairs, dust, smudges, and fingerprints that end up on a photo... an ink reservoir that empties during the printing of an image, that slowly begins to fade halfway through...”

These are the parts of the photograph that make them tangible, as much a part of the world as eyes or paint, and she, as Christophe Van Gerrewey puts it,

“gives all these errors or irregularities material presence by means of paint.”

I come from a generation that replaced cameras with iPhones and print with iCloud before we could truly appreciate how physical and subjective the processes of sight, photography, and painting are. Now, in my early twenties, many of my friends and I are returning to digital and Polaroid cameras because we long for the very details that Klein captures.

The smudges, the errant reflection, the streak of red over shadow—these are the details that remind us that observing and creating are distinctly human acts. As Jannie Regnerus writes in the book,

“It is this painterliness, the personal handwriting of brushstroke and tonality, that brings back warmth and humanity to the predominantly bleak settings.”

Enjoy the sun this weekend,
Jasmine

Ivory Black, Deep Orange Yellow by Carla Klein is designed by Mainstudio (Edwin van Gelder) and was released in 2024.

Order Ivory Black, Deep Orange Yellow >>>

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