Erica Baum

First published in paperback in 2011, Erica Baum’s (born 1961) much-acclaimed Dog Ear is now reissued in a beautiful hardcover edition with a wraparound poster cover. The concept of Dog Ear is simple and straightforward: dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text. The photographs are formally quite neutral and sedate--cursorily reminiscent of Albers’ Homage to the Square series--but the text also demands attention and is what allows or coaxes the viewer to linger. In his introduction to the book, Kenneth Goldsmith asks: “Do we see them or do we read them? If we choose to read them, how should we read? Across the fold? Through it? Around it? If we choose to look at Baum’s pictures, how should we see them? As artistic photographs? Documentation? Text art?”

Erica Baum’s (born 1961) The Naked Eye is the first exhaustive monograph on the artist’s eponymous series (2008–present). The volume features a suite of 58 color reproductions of Baum’s celebrated photographs, which capture slices of imagery and text within the pages of illustrated books. Essays by French writer Jean Max Colard and American curator Cathleen Chaffee elucidate the work, considering its context and relevance. A precise, economical storyteller, Erica Baum has become internationally known for her photographic work of the past two decades, which mines found sources of text and image, from art-historical indices and library card catalogues to esoteric illustrated parlor games. In this volume, Baum photographs old softcovers from their sides, revealing their fanned-out, aging pages as opposed to their spines. Without caption or context, the sliced and fragmented text of these pages creates a new narrative, one made abstract in Baum’s imagery.