Notable Days
Pavel Büchler (1990)
Notable Days is a book that attempts − through the turning of the printed page − to reconfigure time and the calendar. Notable Days presents a “full year of days” though within this year time shifts, days disappear and are re-sequenced suggesting that history is never complete.
The images in the book are enlarged from newspapers revealing the half-tone screen used to print them. The first section presents images of hands taken from photographs of people notable enough to be featured in newspapers; severed from their bodies and their contexts, their meaning is lost. These images are interspersed with a repeated image of a crowd with flags − a demonstration or a celebration?
As the book progresses further images of demonstrations are overlaid until the last pages appear as dense black. The events immortalised here exist in a past that has been edited and reconfigured, reminding us that newspapers and photographs are unreliable in their recounting of history.
