Cape Distance is a book of 26 black-and-white landscape photographs by the German photographer Werner Hannappel, with a text by the writer and mapmaker Tim Robinson in English and French. The pictures come from the Netherlands, Iceland, Scotland, France, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary and Norway. ECM listeners know Hannappel's eye from the cover of the Hilliard Ensemble's The Lamentations of Jeremiah.
Hannappel was born in Essen in 1946. He worked extensively in France for the DATAR photographic mission, the state survey of the French landscape, but his preference has gone to the open spaces of the north. His prints are held by the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The V&A also keeps the 1987 LP of Tallis's Lamentations (ECM 1341). Its sleeve, designed by Barbara Wojirsch, shows his photograph of a calm sea seen from a cliff.
Robinson (1935-2020) was born in Yorkshire, studied mathematics at Cambridge and moved to the Aran Islands in 1972. He mapped Aran, the Burren and Connemara, publishing the maps through Folding Landscapes, the imprint he ran with his wife Máiréad from Roundstone. His prose grew out of that fieldwork, in the two volumes on Aran and the Connemara trilogy, whose first part, Listening to the Wind, appeared in 2006. He died in London in April 2020. His papers at the University of Galway hold the 1997-1998 correspondence with the editor Geert Bisschop about writing for a book of Hannappel's photographs.
The photographs leave out anecdote. Hannappel's black-and-white prints stress the graphic, almost signal-like force of natural forms. The Société Générale collection, which owns his work, describes "bitter and desolate panoramas" that "reveal a network of fine and essential signs hidden in the natural elements". That restraint is close to the visual world of ECM's covers, where open water and empty horizons have long been a recurring image. Robinson's own books rest on the same close, patient attention to a single stretch of land and shore.
A 64-page book with 26 black-and-white photographs and Tim Robinson's text printed in English and French, published by Arp Editions (ISBN 2-930115-03-3) and distributed by ECM.
