The result of a series started in 2008, all of The Naked Eye photographs are looks between the fanned pages of paperbacks that date back to the 1950s–1970s. This first exhaustive monographic publication of an ongoing series reveal a particular taste for mass-market celebrity biographies and movie novelizations featuring photo sections and pulpy paper stained by brightly-dyed edges.
“Instead of a metaphorical textbook we might consult, Baum represents the past as a series of encroaching volumes, their pages filled with characters that refuse to accept their destiny as exhausted signs. […] The warped pages, colored edges, and interrupting clusters of text are all demonstrations that the ‘present' into which these characters seem to reach only existed for Baum's camera; it lasted just a fraction of a second. And that photographic present is more than lost; it is unrepeatable. Flipping through any book a second time, we'll all find something different, not only because each passing moment is unlike the one before, but also because we will, by then, be different readers.
Like apparitions, Baum's vivified subjects emerge from a soup of visual cultural material, and their resistance makes them feel distinctly relevant: to the way we remember; to our changing relationship with books and technology; to our ongoing romance with fiction. But all this, as Baum's photographs also critically remind us, has already taken place. They oblige us to consider the precariousness of our own viewpoint—a present moment that, even now, is also retreating into the pulpy background.”
Cathleen Chaffee
In the past twenty years, photographer Erica Baum (born 1961 in New York, where she lives and works) has become increasingly well known for creating new vernacular poetry from found printed material. While Baum's light touch with found poetry has become her signature, her real work lies in dogged investigation. Like a miner working a deposit of precious metal, she begins by identifying prospects—card catalogues, player piano rolls, Viewmaster slides, novels, even parlor games—and speculates on the productive vein, the new relevance to visual culture they might yet contain. She chips away over time, and only completes such photographic series when the materials stop yielding images that, to Baum, are useful for the contemporary.
Texts by Cathleen Chaffee and
Jean-Max Colard.
Graphic design: Myriam Barchechat.
Published with Bureau, New York.
published in November 2015
bilingual edition (English / French)
20 x 25 cm (hardcover)
144 pages (58 color & 9 b/w ill.)
ISBN : 978-2-9541369-4-3
EAN : 9782954136943
in stock
