SPARKLING PAST
Klaus Speidel & Benjamin Hugard

For this publication, Benjamin Hugard and award-winning art critic Klaus Speidel appropriate preparatory images for studio photography that advertising photographer Jean-François De Witte only made to optimize his shots of mouth-watering beer, subtle dishwashers or carefully lit motors, pictures never published before, icons from the age of analogue, when a sparkle you wanted to see in a photo first had to be created in the world. All these pictures lack something or have something more than the final shots chosen by the ad agencies at the time. But it's precisely in the diversity and quality of their blemishes that the authors see their critical and poetic potential. Beyond its documentary aspect, Sparkling Past is a visual and verbal essay that raises deep questions about authorship and the artworld’s paradoxical relationship to advertising.