Living Stone Press

Stone

2022, 15x21 cm, 64 pages, 100 copies

Images: Hanna Mattes, Louise West

Text: Hanna Mattes, excerpts from Man and His Symbols,C.G Jung (1964)

Design: Louise West

“Stone” is a book showcasing rocks that I collected and photographed between 2015 and 2018. Apart from a couple of minerals bought in stores or given to me, the book is composed of stones I found on streets, in gardens and beaches, in meteorite impact craters, volcanoes and other interesting or ordinary places around the world. The images are accompanied by my own texts as well as excerpts from C. G. Jung’s “Man and His Symbols”.

The book celebrates the beauty of rocks, stones and pebbles. It shines a light on ordinary objects and questions the value we give to things. What determines the price of a stone is commonly based on beauty (its clarity, colour and cut), rarity, durability, demand, tradition and portability. Based on this logic, it could be said that any rock could be classified as a gemstone if it meets the above criteria. If they are presented like gemstones, perhaps they are?

Why is a mineral or a diamond, that can be bought in a store, more precious than a pebble found on a London street? Provided the latter is connected to a specific memory, place or time it could possibly have more meaning and thus (personal) value to us. Jung explains: “{We} have collected stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life-force with all its mystery.”

I have always felt connected to stones and rocks. In 2016, I started a more serious collection, when I dived into research on meteorites, or ‘alien stones’, that would eventually lead to my first photographic monograph “Searching for the Cold Spot” (2017, Deutscher Kunstverlag). Picking up ‘common’ stones from meteorite impact sites, made me understand that any object can have immense value once we assign it thus.

This book shows stones collected in:

(order of appearance)

Atacama Desert, Chile, 2017

Hydra, Greece, 2014

Lanzarote, Spain, 2016

Ozarks, Arkansas, USA, 2017

Campsite near Moab, Utah, USA, 2016

Berkeley Square, London, UK, 2017

Riverbed near Eureka Springs, Arkansas, USA, 2018

A Berlin store, Germany, 2015

Upheaval Dome, Utah, USA, 2016

On the road, Wyoming, USA, 2017

Ubehebe Crater, California, USA; 2016

A gem stone given to me in Santiago de Chile, 2017

A vineyard, Loire region, France, 2015