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Texte zur zeitgenössischen Fotografie und digitalen Bildkunst
von Sebastian Hau
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Schlagworte: Chris Coekin
Chris Coekin: The Hitcher
A few years ago Dewi Lewis published Coekin’s book „Knock Three Times“, which went by largely unnoticed. Focusing on a social club for the working class, combining reportage, portrait and found material, this was already a very nice book. Coekin’s starting point was his parents, who frequent the club, a close circle of family friends and the beginning of a research into the emblems and imagery of the working class and its politics. One of Coekin’s strong qualities is his photographic eye for gestures, something that re-appears in this new book. Over the last few years he has been hitching, zig-zagging across the UK, and „The Hitcher“ could be considered as a travellogue. The book was produced in collaboration with the Photographers’ Gallery, but its design doesn’t make it a regular photobook on first sight. The main qualities here is not printing and slickness, but rather the handmade and badly reproduced. The book doesn’t want to appear worse than it is, but directly one feels that it doesn’t belong to the usual crowd of photobooks and that its author is looking at things somewhat differently. Chris Coekin was not out on an exploration, following intuition and chance, at least that’s not the story the book tells. The simple and convincing set up is this: Self-portraits of the hitcher, on rainy and clouded motorways mostly, stretching out a sign with his destination, portraits that take time to be read. Coekin documents the different types of asking to be took along (which can only be asked by a complex gesture of the body – looking friendly, trustworthy, in need of help, etc), and abstracting an interest in his self rather seeks an outward view, e.g. how do I look like for the people who drive by me.
25.09.2008
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