Two of Us

This artist book, designed and printed as a novel, presents a city of multiplication, where phenomena are not unique, but repetitions of each other. It 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 housed at the Visual Studies Workshop). This pattern consists of images of people who look alike while they walk next to or behind each other on the street. Two of Us relates this to the notion of the 'double', a motif that is also interesting in the light of the technology of photography, seeing photography as a producer of doubles. The images of doubles are combined with a poem by Baudelaire, Les sept vieillards (in an English translation). The layout of the text causes a disjunctive reading of the poem. It has been broken apart into separate words, set, and rotated progressively at an angle below each photograph. Flipping the pages causes the words to move like the hand of a clock as the poem reads sequentially from front-to-back on the right pages and, on the left pages, from back-to-front. This movement causes the book to turn back on its own footsteps, instead of ending. (Homepage der Künstlerin).