Roni Horn
[Artist, b. 1955, New York, lives in New York and Iceland.]
As is often said of photography, this photograph is a frozen moment. A frozen moment is not a moment at all.
A non-analogue image has an extremely compressed life. It starts as this and, in increasingly short time spans, becomes that.
After a few days [in Iceland] I tried to take a photograph. But with my attempt to distinguish the first shot, the place disappeared on me…. I hadn’t been in Iceland long enough to simply be there.
Usually, the subject matter of the image is not the subject of the work.
A book is really a sensual, if not sexual experience and I use these books to focus people in this very intimate one-on-one relationship. The book can become a kind of mirror. The book has an inside and an outside. (A lot of things don’t have that. They have only outsides; images for example.) And then you enter it and it has a fixed sequence. It has a before and an after, there is a narrative implicit in it.
I understand all the work to be of a nonabstract nature regardless of the style, form, or explicit subject matter because all the work... is concerned with evoking experiences that are in themselves—and their relationship to you, the viewer—the ultimate subject and content of the work. I want to equate the experience of the work with its meaning.