Andy Summers
Andy Summers, former guitarist and composer of the legendary band The Police, has built a unique photographic body of work to parallel his musical oeuvre. According to Summers, these photographs constitute the mental and visual counterpart of his music, marked by a complex melodic search and harmonies of rather melancholic and even convulsive colors. Summers compares these autobiographical photographs to tearing the pages of an intimate diary and reconfiguring them into a new visual syntax. Summers borrows the title, A Certain Strangeness, from the poet Coleridge, saying that the phase succinctly captures a photograph's ability to open a viewer's eye wide. Andy Summers has had several photographic books devoted to him.
Designed by Gilles Mora, in close collaboration with the artist, this book presents the most creative visual work of photographer/musician Andy Summers, including many unpublished images. A long autobiographical text by Summers tells of his passion for photography. A text by Gilles Mora situates Summers’s photographic work in American modernist photography.
The frames [Summers] composes and chooses for the book are epic scenes of life that are at once mundane and magnificent. They are a way of looking and seeing the world that are rich and resonant with a sensitivity to the moment: a sense of being fully present and discovering that which is hiding in plain sight — the eternal, ethereal mystery of the this thing we call life.
Gilles Mora has been the editor in chief of the magazine Les Cahiers de la Photographie, an editor with Éditions du Seuil in Paris, and the artistic director of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles. Currently he is the director of the city of Montpellier’s Pavillon Populaire. He was awarded the Nadar Prize for The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies.
