Robbert Flick, born in Holland in 1939, is a Southern California artist who uses photography as his primary medium. This gorgeous new monograph presents an important, early body of work that would inform Flick’s approach to all of his subsequent artistic activities:

"The late 1960s was an open-ended time with very few boundaries. I was interested in rendering my photographic experience of Los Angeles, and wanted to emphasize the process of that experience. Rather than framing a moment, it became important to acknowledge it. This meant that the act of photographing became a gesture. I was also quite poor and had a limited amount of film. I kept some several dozen self-rolled films in a shoebox; whenever I went out I would reach in for four or five of them, and return them back into the box when exposed, leaving a snippet of leader so the film could be reused. I would have absolutely no idea what was on which film I put in my camera.

At the time I would think of film as an endless continuum, and there was a wish to acknowledge that aspect visually … the idea of multiple exposures was linked to ideas about simultaneity, the use of the “I Ching” and “there is no such thing as accident”. I photographed in this manner for a period of three years."

One of the images on the cover of the book captures a moment from an Ortiz destruction event: where a piano filled with blood was hammered apart with an axe and subsequently a large number of mice were set free in mousetrap-filled areas on the floor. This Destruction Performance very much summarized the political conditions of the time and the senseless destruction of human life and landscapes engendered by the Vietnam war.