Photographs: Thomas Vandenberghe
Publisher: Akina books
80 pages with 136 black and white reproductions
First edition, 2016.
Limited to 200 handmade copies
French Fold Stab Strip Binding, 210 x 285 mm. 2 Colours Silkprinting on White Cloth
Best photobook 2016 for 10×10 Photobook Team
"Thomas Vandenberghe’s Can’t Pay You to Disappear is one of the most haunting photobooks published in the past year" - Loring Knoblauch (Collector Daily)
They went to a pond, in the pines.
The first time they were there together, wild and free.
The second time, after months, he found himself in the same place alone at night, measuring the forest with restless steps back and forth “`Nobody would find you here for months” he said to himself.
This time they just sat on a rock, next to the water.
“It would be nice if you were always easy going like this” she said
“Uh” he said, his eyes lost in running water.
The rage was gone and with the rage, everything else was also gone.
“Things will be fine from now on”
“Yes maybe”
“I want to go back”
“There’s no way out either”
The “Can’t pay you to disappear” urgent unraveling of the life-span of an intense relationship where love, death and obsession mix, also follows Vandenberghe’s ever-changing relationship with photography, from his early clean minimal images to his experiment with collage and physical intervention on the prints themselves.
The images of the book are scanned from Thomas’ original darkroom prints and mostly retain their original sizes, giving a precious insight to the photographers’ process and evolution.
Born in 1985, Belgium, Thomas Vandenberghe is part of the AM projects collective