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In between entering: a photo/graphic periphery of Paris. On Stephan Keppel’s ‘Entre Entree’ (Fw:Books, 2014)

There is a lot of doubling going on in Stephan Keppel’s 2014 photobook Entre Entree, beginning with its idiosyncratic title. Keppel took it from an entrance sign to a Parisian supermarket that said ‘entree’ (entrance) twice, but the last e of the first ‘entre/’ was erased.

Entre Entree results from a succession of two residencies, six months at Atelier Holsboer, close to the hustle and bustle of stereotypical Paris, and another half year at the former Parisian home of Dutch avant-garde artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), in Meudon Val Fleury in the southern periphery of the French metropolis. A short sequence in the book shows a recording of a performance inspired by Van Doesburg’s concept of the ‘dynamic diagonal’: a long stick falling down from a pedestal towards the residential bungalow.

Keppel meandered through Paris’s spacious, anonymous outskirts, as well as his own studio, aiming his camera at doors, stairways, found objects, neon tubes, printers, façades of a variety of modernist high-rises flats, veins in marble, and scattered exotic planting. Keppel then reworked most of the black-and-white pictures—scanning, printing and reprinting them multiple times, thereby experimenting with contrast, color inversion, toners, inks, (halftone) screens and paper quality. Some of the more graphical images are all about line, texture and form.