Where to view Girls vs. Books:
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Cynthia Sears Collection, WA
Minneapolis College of Art & Design, MN
Pennsylvania State University Libraries, PA
Rollins College, Olin Library, Artist Book Collection, Winter Park, FL
University of California, Young Library, Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA
University of Miami, Special Collections, FL
Lux Mentis, Booksellers, Portland Maine
Vamp & Tramp Booksellers, Birmingham Alabama
Books > Girls vs. Books
Girls vs. Books is an artist’s book made from my Storied Books photographic series about vernacular altered books.
The extra-illustrated books in the photos were grangerized, stamped, and drawn in between 1865 and the 1970’s by young women who didn’t think twice about violating the sanctity of the printed page with their own editorializations. Several of the (known) defacers grew up to be writers, editors and artists themselves.
My edition echoes its subject matter: I constructed it by cutting up and rebinding commercially-printed books of my photos and then titling them with rubber stamps.
72 pages, 10” x 8”.
Edition of 15 copies, $550
More on the Storied Books photograph series:
Books act upon us, changing our minds and lives. We act upon them by turning pages, by dog-earing or underlining important passages, and by passing them around. Certain books bear the marks of more aggressive interaction, however, and this is what I have been documenting with my ongoing project in three parts, Storied Books.
While engaged in the daily struggle to protect my own books from the ravages of little hands, I noticed that many of the crayon- and pencil- marks made by long-grown children have now matured into enhancements. I began photographing volumes that had been “defaced” long ago by a persistent series of girls and women who have talked back to their books.
From this dialogue, along with changes to the books wrought by passing time, several themes have emerged in the photographs, and so I have divided my photographs [not the book] into three subseries. Part 1 includes the grangerized biography of a forgotten movie star from the 1920’s. It looks at love and longing, and questions the notion of immortality. The photographs in Part 2 and Part 3 present beautiful, brash challenges to two longstanding tropes: feminine fragility and the sanctity of the printed page.
These photographs are portraits of transcendent commonplace objects, cherishing the forms and textures of books. Beyond simple lyricism or nostalgia, however, the images celebrate the active consumption of information. They encourage us – even digital natives – to question, enhance, and transmute our received cultural mores.
Click on a (cropped) thumbnail to see full-frame images.