World of Dew — Vincent Manzi

World Of Dew By Vincent Manzi — The World of Dew

The private, fleeting world of photographer Vincent Manzi

Words Park Taehui
Photos Vincent Manzi
In collaboration with Anmok Photobook Gallery* www.anmoc.com
* Vincent Manzi’s photography exhibition ‘World of Dew’ runs at Anmok Photobook Gallery through July 3, 2022. Located in Busan, Anmok Photobook Gallery is a multipurpose space run by Anmok Publishing, made up of a bookstore, a gallery, and a music room. The Anmok bookstore displays and sells not only books published by Anmok Publishing but also Korean and international titles curated by Anmok. It also runs a print shop that sells photographic prints, and opens its music room on Wednesday through Saturday evenings.

A Moment Drops Anchor

Vincent Manzi’s ‘World of Dew’ series is an extraction from sixteen years of work. Here, extraction means something like a scientist setting a funnel in the lab to filter out a pure solution: countless repeated failures, nights of uncertainty, solitude, and, finally, a measured quantity of what remains after the filtering.
Manzi shoots with a small film camera. He develops the film, makes files with a scanner, adjusts his own tones and values in the digital darkroom (Photoshop), and then prints with an inkjet printer. It matters a great deal that every step of this process is done by the photographer’s own hands. In photography, everything from the shooting to the final print is a matter of choices, and the work is a combination of mental and physical labor. Over a long period, he edited his prints, bound them, made several books, and gave them to a few acquaintances.

When I received the second book, I asked Manzi whether he had ever shown these photographs to a gallery. He answered that what matters more than exhibiting in a gallery or making a name as an artist is communicating through his work with the people close to him. His ambition is greater than that of any artist.

Over the past sixteen years, Manzi has married, had a child, and worked to make a living while traveling back and forth between New York and Istanbul. He has also put into practice the idea that creative work should be at the center of our lives, continuing his photography tirelessly. Now the third book is in my hands. It is not a printed book but a portfolio made of prints Manzi produced himself, so it has a presence that makes it hard to flip through casually. I realize that certain moments, having walked the long road from New York to Istanbul to reach me, could become important encounters of a lifetime.

A Short Interview with Vincent Manzi**

Why do you work back and forth between New York and Istanbul? Are you trying to connect or compare the two places in a single photograph?
Both New York and Istanbul, where I shoot, are places where I live and that I call home. When I take pictures, I try not to approach them with a mind to compare or comment. My goal is to develop a way of seeing, and in the process, different places and subjects end up connected.

At first glance the pictures can seem ordinary and everyday, yet they come across as very unusual moments and scenes. I’m curious about the moment when you press the shutter.
Thank you for saying that. The short answer is that I press the shutter a lot. The more closely I look, the less anything seems ordinary. By photographing the many opportunities I meet in the world outside, I can get close to the flow of life as it is now, and the editing afterward is like a process of distillation. Eight rolls of film might yield ten prints, and hundreds of photographs extracted over several years get bound into a single book. Because the important decisions are made during editing, I want to forget everything I know while I’m pressing the shutter.

Why did you make photobooks first, rather than an offline exhibition or online posts?
We can sit down, look through a photobook, and rest. Anmok Photobook Gallery, where photographs, photobooks, and coffee come together, encourages this very intention. My photographs seem to come alive when they’re seen as printed pieces, and they lose some of their vitality on a monitor. Still, some photographers’ pictures look much better on a monitor. Printing with ink simply suits the particular atmosphere I’m after. Making photobooks is my way of communicating with other people through my work. I send them to people I trust to be honest with me, and that helps me keep working.

How do you decide on the titles of your works? And what does each title mean?
The titles of individual photographs are usually locations or place names. The titles of my books or chapters are more abstract, and they don’t always refer to something visual and clear. My experience of dew is one of glittering and evaporation. The title comes from a translation of a poem*** by the Japanese haiku poet Kobayashi Issa. During hard times, this poem meant a great deal to me. I can’t express it well, but the point is the transience and impermanence of everything. At some point, my work began to express that awareness. Photography is a medium that can deal directly with the temporal nature of life, and I’m most interested in experiencing everything from that perspective. It’s something that doesn’t happen unless you keep watching the world outside.

I’d like to know which camera models and film you carry.
I always use a Leica M5 fitted with a Summicron or Zeiss C Biogon 35mm lens. Sometimes I also use a Contax T2. My freezer is full of Kodak Portra 400. I develop at home, scan the film using a wet-mount method, adjust in Photoshop, and print with an inkjet printer.

** The interview with Vincent Manzi was conducted by email in April 2022.

*** This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet