Title: Cover to Cover
Artist: Michael Snow
Publisher: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and New York University Press
Format: 316 pages, 23 x 18 cm
ISBN: none
A structuralist photography book, meant to be read cover to cover, meaning front to back, delivering a sequence of images printed full bleed (printed to the edge of the page, without borders). There is no text, so the title printed on the spine must be our guide. One can see at a glance that a single male figure is present throughout. From this one might assume that there is narrative structure—a following of this figure from cover to cover, as familiar from memoirs, diaries, or novels. This impression is both right and wrong, for the journey is not smooth.
The book is entirely composed of images made by two photographers aiming their cameras at the object-artist who is caught in a photographic crossfire; sometimes we see the photographers, mostly we do not. Their synchronized exposures result in two parallel sequences. They form a pair that is presented back to back, or recto-verso, on each leaf of the book. In creating this work Snow underlines two characteristics of the photographic image in print: how photographic representation compresses three-dimensional objects, and the thinness of the printed sheet. To do so he had to break the reader’s habits.