Desirer Walks the Streets

Nazraeili Press
Released 2009 ISBN: 978-1-59005-256-3
Hardcover, 9 x 14, 128 pages, 84 duotone plates.

Desirer Walks the Streets presents a dark stream of black and white photographs that are culled from Andy Summers’s life as a traveling musician. From a working life that outwardly would appear to be extroverted and chaotic, Summers has created a set of quietly compelling images that contradict the obvious. Made between 1983 and 2008, with a preference for the night shot, and covering a wide geographical graph from the Alto Plano of Bolivia to the alleys of the Golden Gai in Tokyo, the photographs convey a sense of intimacy, surrealism and situations that may be described as ‘in media res.’

Summers states that his photography may indeed be influenced by his absorption with music and that in a sense the photography he creates is a visual counterpart to the music that never leaves his head. Thus in Summers musical predilections – that may be termed as a taste for the melancholic, the convulsive melodic line, the dark chord with a few stray notes added – we find the brooding minor key photography he is attracted to. He adds that music and photography are kindred spirits in that they are nonverbal arts, but handily, may have interchangeable terms. He describes his own act of photography as tearing pages from a book and then reshuffling the results into a new visual syntax. Desirer Walks the Streets is the third monograph by Andy Summers and his first for Nazraeli Press. Andy Summers has been active as photographer since 1979 with numerous exhibitions, magazine essays, publications, and recently, keynote presentations of his photography. The recipient of a large number of music awards he is also a Doctor of the Arts and a Chevalier des Artes et Lettres.

Past Exhibitions and Events

Special Events with Andy

Saturday April 4, 2009
3:00pm Talk by Andy Summers at BLD Gallery
Application by telephone: 03-5524-3903
4:30pm Book signing at the gallery with Andy

Sunday April 5, 2009
1:00pm Book signing at Aoyama Book Centre Main store
Cosmos Aoyama Garden floor 2bf, 5-53-67
Jingumae,Shibuya-ku Tokyo150-0001
Telephone: 03-5485-5511