Jan Philipzen, Ravedeath Convention

Started as a visual diary, ‘Ravedeath Convention’ soon grew into  a hybrid of autobiography and fiction. While love, joy and friendship are explored, violence and excess come about too, often captured only as traces and symptoms. A collision of different, occasionally mismatched, cultural symbols stresses the all-embracing blend of subcultres as a fundamental feature of our times.

The first pictures taken at age thirteen, this series of black and white images is the edit of a continuous process of photographing, revisiting and reworking over a span of ten years. In the crippled prints the physical presence of body and photograph merge, celebrating human imperfection. The title references Tim Hecker’s album ‘Ravedeath, 1972’.