In 1911, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who would later call himself Le Corbusier, sets off with his friend August Klipstein on a seven-month trip to “the Orient.”
The visual cargo of Me, Le Corbusier, and a friend consists of the photographs they took on this trip using a single, shared camera and glass plates—a physical effort that is hard to imagine today. The plates’ imperfections create a sense of primitive authenticity, of an archaic world emerging through layers of time.
The audio component of the book is a ‘dialogue’ between the two protagonists—a playful mise-en-scène by artist David Bergé—which imagines the two young Swiss men moving through different landscapes and discovering themselves with the tools they share: a camera and a guidebook for Westerners.