Fortunes of War

'Eric Lesdema’s Fortunes of War offers an enticing and fundamentally unsettling engagement with the tensions (war) and consequences of the everyday. Nothing – not even the project title– can be taken at face value. As is suggested, image-meaning and significance float freely sometimes finding temporary anchors within specific conceptual or social contexts. Resonances between essays and images intrigue in this complex publication that takes its time to seduce the reader.'

-- Liz Wells, University of Plymouth

'The nine essays comprising the first half of the book operate in dialogue with the subsequent colour reproductions of the original photographic work, Fortunes of War, which was awarded the UN Nikon World Prize in 1997. In their detailed analytical approaches, the critical texts illuminate specific facets of the logic and power of Fortunes of War. Lesdema developed his Ant-optik method of constructing an anterior perspective in order to reframe visual appearances as a state of becoming, where what is arranged by an image is understood as always provisional and relational.

 

The book shows us the absolute historical limits of photographic representation and its semiotic analysis, now eclipsed by the networked image, as well as Lesdema’s serious and valiant attempt to rethink the dominant photographic paradigm and discover a practice of image making which resonates with the forces of change. It might well be said that the practice Lesdema developed from the 1990s, intuited the end of photography through a methodological practice which recognised in the medium the viral re-composition of materials and the bodies they represent. Fortunes of War speaks to war understood as capitalism by another means. In the opening of his own essay in the book, Lesdema asks ‘Is physical time a form of techno-capital?’ (p.61) and the answer across all of the contributions to the book is clearly a yes. The book is a profound announcement that there is no Euclidian geometry, no Albertian window, nor single point perspective, from which the violence of capital can be expressed.'

-- Andrew Dew