Roger Eberhard

Meanwhile takes the twelve most frequently suggested historical events — chosen from over 140 put forward by twenty photographers, researchers and thinkers from around the world — as its defining turning points of the past three hundred years. Using a historical archive image for each event, Roger Eberhard then traces the concurrent and parallel events unfolding elsewhere in history.

The twelve: the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, the First Opium War, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, the Electoral Act of New Zealand, the beginning of the First World War, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the independence of Cameroon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As Paris stormed the Bastille, a Scottish fur trader reached the wrong ocean and named a river after his disappointment; the night the Haitian Revolution began, two astronomers in England discovered a star cluster. Combining new and archival photography, the book treats history not as a single line but, in Barbara Kruger's words, as "narratives that accumulate."

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Roger Eberhard (b. 1984, Zürich) is a Swiss photographer whose work examines how history and power become visible in place. His previous books include Human Territoriality (named one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books) and Standard. In 2012 he founded the publishing house b.frank books.

192 pages
Paper: Gardapat Bianca
23 × 32 cm

ISBN: 978-1-917282-34-5