Elisabeth Tonnard, Two of Us: Encounters
424 pages, 6 x 9 inches, black and white, perfect bound, paperback, 2007

The book, designed and printed like a novel, reconstructs a pattern found in the immense archive of a street photographer working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s (the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop). It shows countless doubles, walking the city streets. The images are combined with a poem by Baudelaire, which is broken apart into separate words, set, and rotated progressively at an angle below each photograph. Flipping the pages causes the words to pirouette as the poem reads sequentially from front-to-back on the recto and, on the verso, from back-to-front.

$40

“Elisabeth Tonnard crafted a work of visual literature that caused time to stand still in a repetitive encounter with the most perplexing figure of modernity, the double.” “Two of Us makes a thought-provoking contribution to a growing body of theoretical literature on the different status of the flaneur in contemporary culture. This artist's book has the added merit of embedding theory performatively in the nuanced rhetoric of archival images.” from Chris Burnett in: “Encounters with a Very-Large Picture Collection: The Joseph Selle Collection of Street Vendor Photography” Afterimage, November 2007 Link to an interview about Two of Us on Dutch radio: http://boeken.vpro.nl/personen/22544242/

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