
Pelči Manor
- Publisher
- Perimeter Editions
- Year
- 2019
- ISBN
- 978-0-9876371-8-5
- Specifications
- Unbound softcover with elastic cord
30.5 x 20 cm
36 pages
250 copies
Printed by Momento Pro, Australia
Shot over three days in the attic of Pelči Manor – a grand 19th-century art nouveau structure in the small Latvian town of Kuldīga – this book by Melbourne photographer Sarah Walker offers an ominous, curious and claustrophobic vantage on a historically loaded building. The site where Latvia ceded independence to Nazi occupation during World War II is today used as a school for disabled children. Walker's dynamic high-flash photographs, composed in the dark and reviewed after the fact, free the cavernous attic of its historical weight: geometrical forms stutter, shadow and repeat; Latvian graffiti, cigarette butts and dead critters litter surfaces; jagged objects and rusted tools gesture towards signs of violence. Pelči Manor feels like an obsessive thought looping and rearranging itself, searching for a solution that may never present itself.