Perspectives: Polaroids, 1982-84 de David Sylvian - 1984

DAVID SYLVIAN PERSPECTIVES: POLAROIDS 1982-84 HARDBACK BOOK.

In 1984 a limited edition book by David Sylvian of polaroid collages was published entitled Perspectives. This was released to coincide with the London exhibition, which was then staged in Tokyo, Milan, and Turin.

It's a very beautiful and rare book containing colour prints of his collages featuring many famous persons as subject of those collages like Steve Jansen, Holger Czukay, Yuka Fujii and Angus McBean.

From the dust-jacket:
'The moment the light from the viewer illuminated the slide that had arrived from London, I was reminded of 'Despair', one of David Sylvian's songs written for JAPAN. I was also reminded of some words of Egon Schiele, the painter contemporary of Erik Satie, Satie being a sort of inspiration to David to compose this music so vividly encapsulated by its title. Schiele wrote of his desire to paint the melancholy of autumn that he felt in the height of summer.

Since first meeting David in 1980, I have been continually captivated and entertained by his extremely developed aesthetic sense, and a certain peculiar perversity that extends upon it. I am delighted that he has decided to add photography to his music as a new mode of expression.

This collage of Polaroid photographs is without doubt the expression of Sylvian's aestheticism, and their distorted charm and magical depth capture the imagination immediately, by-passing critical rationality.

The great surrealist André Breton once made a prophetic remark about the invention of the camera dealing a fatal blow to conventional methods of expression, forcing artists to deviate from mere reproduction.

'Gentlemen Take Polaroids'. the title of a JAPAN album released in the autumn of 1980, seems to me to have been equally prophetic.