Now Is Not The Right Time
Peter Pflüger
Family secrets can resurface and haunt us back in shocking intensity for years. After experiencing such a phenomenon himself, Peter Pflüger decided to transfer his family secrets and transgenerational trauma into a photobook: Now Is Not The Right Time. In the book he reveals that when he was only two years old, his father went into the woods intending to never come back.
Peter Pflüger is an Austrian visual storyteller living in the Netherlands. In his first photobook Now Is Not The Right Time he digs into the secrets of his own family and its hidden histories.
Throughout his childhood, Peter Pflüger had an indefinable, deeply sad feeling. Where did that came from ? He had no idea. Until his parents told him what they had kept from him for years. His father’s suicide attempt was kept quiet for twenty years. And yet somehow he always knew.
Now Is Not The Right Time is about the impact of a big secret in Peter Pflüger’s family. For a long time he didn’t know how he wanted to tell his story. Until he tried to tell it in metaphors. That was the visual language for his story he was looking for.
Starting point into this approach was this idea: his father went into the woods with the intention of never coming back. He did come back, but he brought the woods with him. So Pflüger tried to photograph that. Another aspect was balance and the difficult task of keeping a secret. It takes effort to keep it hidden. It takes effort to balance daily life. This balancing act is also a recurring symbol in the photographs.
Now Is Not The Right Time is designed in such a way that it slowly unravels its secret. The book is bound in a way that pages are folded and that there is more information and imagery inside. Pflüger unfolds the family history with texts from the diaries from his sister, mother and himself which are literally hidden between the pages. It feels as that readers can peek inside those concealed pages to look for cues.
Now Is Not The Right Time
Photographer: Peter Pflüger
Published by The Eriskay Connection
Published in 2023
Hardcover with uncut signatures, 24 x 29 cm, 112 pages, with 46 color photographs
Includes a fold-out poster glued to the rear of the book