Damaged Negatives

Edition : First / New York / Dashwood / 2013 / Softcover. / Fine
8vo, 60pp. Printed wraps as issued. Numerous Black & White plates. One of 1000 copies.

“I put the images in storage for two weeks, which turned into two months. The entire storage unit flooded and the owner didn’t tell anyone, so by the time I arrived, the images were just mostly gone or in a state of high deterioration.” The book then is an exhumation of that wrecked archive. Figures – including a young Kate Moss – swim mystically in clouded and chthonic black and white, as if reflected in ancient mirrors or trying to interject from a different time. On some images, the damage manifests itself like burnishing and cigarette holes; on others, faces are obscured entirely by whorls of oxidation that lend the sitters and their environments an arcane type of poetic importance. “Fashion is totally industrialized, and I’m trying to entertain myself as part of the mechanism. Clearly, we’re just here to sell clothes. But sometimes we find the images transcend the medium, which can be very nice. I suppose, in some peculiar, twist-of-fate way, these images do that,” he adds. “They’ve dislocated themselves.”

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