Lynn Valley #4
by Annette Kelm

The 4th installment of the Lynn Valley artist book series features an untitled work by the Berlin artist Annette Kelm. Using a detailed studio-shot format reminiscent of advertising photography the book displays six versions of a hat that the artist bought while traveling through New York. Manufactured in China for the US market these hats are a strange cultural hybrid. Their design - a combination of a western baseball cap and a eastern straw hat - grafts two separate idioms together to create a consumer item which is more an interpretation of a western cultural icon rather than a knock-off of it. Each version is fastidiously documented from every angle (there are six in all with yellow, purple, red, beige, blue and black seams respectively).

Critic Kirsty Bell describes Kelm's unique photographic approach: "Her precise, carefully composed, well-lit images, often shot with a large-format camera, luxuriate in surface and clarity of detail while fitting neatly into standard photographic genres: still life, portraiture, landscape. The things they present definitely exist; there is no doubt about that. But something about their brightness seems not quite right. As self-evident as her images appear, they are undercut with a strangeness that questions not only the purpose of the objects, but also the nature of their representation."