Jaeger-LeCoultre - Fourth edition of the Yearbook
The fourth Jaeger-LeCoultre Yearbook is firmly focused on Movement. Each of the eight chapters in this new edition views this theme from a different angle, composing a unified whole that consistently alternates between tranquil slowness and lightning speed, mechanical precision and human emotions, extreme concentration and contemplative serenity.
As both an art book and a field of creative expression, this luxurious publication gives pride of place to images. Well-known photographers such as Sybille Bergmann, Rene Staud and Man Ray rub shoulders with youthful talents including Spanish artist Rosa Basurto, and masters of watchmaking photography like Claude Joray, Gilles Pernet and Jean-Paul Cattin.
Each chapter finds its own "pre-text" (before the text, in the literal sense of the word) in the creations from the Manufacture, in order to open up whole new vistas. As the horological heart of this publication, the Master Grande Tradition a Grande Complication plunges into the historical roots of time measurement, before leaving the floor to the famous astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, whose text is enlivened by pictures of the galaxy taken by the NASA.
The three first issues of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Yearbook carried their number in giant letters on their cover: ONE, TWO, THREE. The fourth presents a mathematical formula: EIGHT/2, eight divided by two. This whimsical numerical twist owes nothing to chance. In its own way, it expresses the Yearbook's mission to merge science with culture, and subjectivity with rationality. In his foreword, Franco Cologni explains : "What for Western tradition is a cardinal number around which fundamental meaningful structures are organised and arranged, for other cultures takes on the sinister appearance of an unlucky number… Anyone surprised by the choice of cover and who suspects it is motivated by superstitions which, in 2010, might seem a little backward, should set aside their unfounded scepticisms and consider the ancient, noble traditions involved in forming letters and numbers: ancestral sounds, meanings that form the very foundations of language and of our intepretation of phyiscal laws. Because if the universe is mysterious and indefinable, our interactions with it are ncessary symbolic: out of the exchange of symbols comes the birth of culture, communication and progress."