Promises to keep

With a title that invites you to imagine even before you’ve flipped through the book’s pages, Max Pam’s album, a compendium of maps, photographs/postcards and notes, recalls, most immediately, a travel journal.

The journal of a long voyage begun in the 1970s, which has repeatedly taken him back to India, to the Far East, to London or Paris, and whose starting and ending point is always Australia.

Ultimately, however, and notwithstanding the importance of travel to the artist’s trajectory, this is not so much a travel journal as a diary that confirms Pam’s interest in photography and his turn to it as a form of autobiographical expression. In order to tell his own history – as well as his stories – Max Pam has invented and gradually perfected an original visual language that recognizes no distinctions between writing and photography, between an image borrowed and an image taken, between the effects of chemistry and those of painting, between collage and patchwork. The result is a collection of forcefully suggestive images that, in breathtaking sequences, establish dialogues among reality, hallucinations, references of all kinds, the intimate and social spheres. (Laura Serani – extract from introduction).