The Mysterious FLOH

I: Mysterious Beginnings

What are we to think when confronted with a photograph in a book, full bleed, double-page spread that does not conform to standard photographic practices? We might say the background is too white and the foreground too dark, details missing. There is no title. However, this is nominally a snow scene: a pine tree is positioned to the right in the middle distance and a mountain in the far distance. The foreground is not only dark it physically obscures our perception of the scene. It is a black stripe running across the bottom third of the image: a window seal. There is a glass to the left glowing dark yellow, plants forming silhouettes both to the left and the right. The origins of the image remain mysterious. We have no idea where the photograph was taken, what moment in time and why it was so special to the person who produced it. I am assuming it is taken from a house, but perhaps this is a tourist image taken from a restaurant. The author of the image is unknown and what made the view so special to them also remains a mystery. It is, to stress a point, utterly silent. I hear no voices of people, see no activity anywhere and my narratives become those of a very quiet observer. I feel utterly suspended in time, as though the rest of the world has carried on without me.

The image is in Tacita Dean’s FLOH. It is a book of images made without words. Writing about it is a paradoxical thing to do as the work is deliberately left silent. There are more images like the one described above, presented on the pages intimately and simply, each unique in relation to the others around it. This book is very much open to our interpretations and narratives, and this is a deliberate strategy by Tacita Dean. This essay forms my own journey through the book and examines the way it is positioned in the world.

Without a doubt, the book is an enigma. Its silence is profound, confusing, sad, cherished and playful. It provokes me. I want to write about it because I want to work out what makes it so special. This journey will take several stages, examining narrative possibilities and the enigma of the work.

II: Text and Context

As all new projects are launched with some kind of announcement, it is no surprise to find a press release for this book. The press release tells us that these images were found in flea markets across Europe and America. We are told that Dean wants the work to open to the viewer’s interpretation, up to them to make stories from the images, forever open ended. Dean hopes the images will return to the flea market in a fragmented state, split up and circulated once again, to become lost and rediscovered. However, there is something unsatisfactory about this statement as I feel it is misleading in some way. There have been several exhibitions and books of recycled images before, what makes this one so engaging?

I have watched friends and colleagues, people familiar with the language of photography, flick through the book. They establish whether there is something about the book that will hold their attention for a longer period of time and consume it quickly on a first viewing. Sometimes they stop and rest on one image alone, something about it captivates them. However, most of them take for granted that the book is a collection of vernacular images: it looks like a book of family snap shots and other found images from flea markets. They also know Dean’s name or able to take it for granted that an artist has managed the book’s presentation. There appears to be little investigation beyond these assumed or stated facts. They have not disclosed or discussed the images that hold their attention for a little longer. I assume that most of these encounters did not result in an extended imaginative encounter, but rather fleeting thoughts and observations, explanations made up in the mind in response to the images.

When I was grappling with the strangeness of the book and the fact that I was not able to take it at face value, a friend pointed out that these are interesting images. He doesn’t ordinarily like photographs, so the fact that he finds this book an exception to the rule is revealing. He thought the reason why I liked the book so much is because it’s visually articulate without being clumsy or self-conscious. The photographs in FLOH are amusing, clever, witty, intelligent, unassuming and none of them pretentious. Other similar projects have revealed this before, Joachim Schmid’s Pictures from the Street, made the same revelations, but the images he found on the streets are markedly different to the ones Dean has presented in FLOH. The fact that we can think of these images as being good is another bizarre assumption. Very few of the images seem to be made to a professional technical standard and it’s almost as though in order to make interesting images, one sometimes needs to be a bad photographer.

I am aggravated by the lack of text, as well as being intrigued that someone has finally made a book of images without words. I wanted to read more about this book; I wanted to be told something about it. I guess this tells you a lot more about me than it does about the work. The only text used in relation to FLOH, apart from the press release, are the few words at the beginning of the book. This ends up telling us the title, the signature of the artist and the number of the edition. There is no critical or introductory essay, and if you bought the book from a bookshop, no press release would be provided.

Of course, the book’s production still has a context. The context is not in the writing, but in the book itself. It is a limited edition book: four thousand copies and each one is bound in linen and has a plain gray slipcover. There is little text on the outside: we are told who the publisher is, how many books there are in the edition, the fact that each is numbered and signed, and also that the work is a collaboration with Martyn Ridgwell.[i]

Now there are several things that are unusual about this. Four thousand copies is not my idea of a limited edition. A standard print run of a photography book in this country is only 1000 copies, and not many photography books would be signed at that print run size. Granted, this book is circulated all over Europe and America and is published by a major European arts publisher, so one would expect a larger print run, but four thousand copies is still a lot for an edition. The signature makes the work look more exclusive while the size of edition helps us to locate a market for the work, but four thousand copies borders on being a mass-produced product. However, it also tells us that the book itself is the art. The work did feature as an exhibition briefly at Frith Street Gallery, but this book is not a catalogue and does not represent a show. The books as it stands is the art and is not a vehicle for promotion.

The signature signifies something else too: authorship. Without an author, work doesn’t sell. I wonder who would have bought this book is there had been no author? I think it would have sold as a collection of images, but I also think the marketing of it would have been very different. Authorship tells us that the artist in question has an oeuvre and a style. This is something of a contradiction as a lot of different people made these images, and there is no overall style to the collection. She did collect, edit and make the images into a book, but this does not quite fit with our traditional concepts of the author. Artists have recycled images before though and for a variety of reasons. Christian Boltanski, for example, makes installations and presentations of images from archives. There is something different about Boltanski’s presentation that is quite distinctly the work of an artist and makes the work transcend whatever institution the images were originally created for. The intention and the purpose of Boltanski’s work is usually clear too. Dean’s work, in comparison, remains blank and the authorship and style of her work remains hidden. Likewise, Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of Edward Weston’s nudes takes a different approach to using images made by other people. Although her strategies and concepts are very different to those of Boltanski, her intentions are made explicit. She worked to undermine the very notion of authorship, to break it from within. Dean, however, is not pretending that these images are hers; she is not openly appropriating it for her own ends in the same way. For the most part, the images seem to be snapshots rather than images created within mechanisms of state control, or images made by great artists. The images are diverse in style.[ii] Some of the images, when treated in isolation, could have been snatched from the family album or read as testaments to individual lives. Some of the other images could have been rejected rather than snatched: their quirky qualities excluding them from a standard family album. I think it is to Dean’s credit that the images do not lose this quality. So on the outside we have authorship, but on the inside, the images are left to be silent, and conform to our expectations of authenticity. If the slipcover was lost, we would lose many of the references to authorship, but not all of them. We would certainly lose all reference to Martyn Ridegwell and even the title would be understated.

But I felt in a way that the concept of the book was not just about flea markets and vernacular images and that there is a key part to the book that we are missing. I feel there is nothing simple about this collection and the presentation; there is something very artful going on here.  I will never be able to uncover the enigma of these individual images, and in a way I don’t want to. What is open for a closer examination is the structure of FLOH and the hidden signs of intervention. These signs of intervention are nearly invisible but relate to the way the images are presented on the page.

III: Narrative Fictions

As FLOH is an invitation for imaginative encounters, I spent some time taking this advice literally and tried to make some narratives from the sequences of the images. The book seems to be split into sections, white pages indicating a new section. So I would start at the beginning of a section and work my way through. However, I soon found out that I was on a losing streak here. So I thought I would try to work out if the same people reappear in different sections, and this proved to be an equally fruitless approach. I think there is one woman who makes more than one appearance, and there is a baby that I think appears more than once. Images, which are obviously made within a few minutes of each other, are grouped together as a subsection within a section. There are a few images which look like they could have been taken on the same day, and they tend to be a few pages apart with other images in between. What happens when you try to match these images up though is that their discontinuities become obvious and you suddenly realize they have nothing in common with each other. This happens several times in the book and just when you think you might be able to spot people and places that have something in common, direct comparison makes them disappear and you are only left with your own uncertainties. The feeling of people reoccurring never quite goes away but it seems to be a figment of my imagination. Simple or obvious narratives of families growing older, expanding and contracting are avoided. While I am still able to make narratives on specific images any logic of the sections is opaque to me. However, this close examination of the book not only revealed the unimaginative exploration I was making, it also enabled me to observe that the images are cropped. I believe this to be the case in many but not all images.

None of the images are presented with their borders. Some of the images are presented full bleed on the page, which means they are probably much bigger in their presentation than in their original state. The cropping is revealed by the fact that the vanishing point seems to be in the wrong place. The cropping feels so significant as it has the effect of making some of the images look like film stills, and the compositions have a very sophisticated feel to them, without them being very obvious. It has occurred to me that by removing signs of ownership or borders, by making all the images conform to various formats (that seem to have not very much in common with standard print formats, now or in the past) that an immediate sentimentality is removed from them. Unlike Joachim Schmid’s Pictures From the Street, mentioned earlier, where the tears, dents, creases and marks form a fundamental part of the work, they do not exist in FLOH. In Schmid’s work we can see how they have been abandoned and lost, discarded, cared for or thrown away. They are presented in their original size and format, with no attempt at making them uniform.  There is no attempt at narrative fictions between the images, and we are not asked to pretend that these people have something in common. However, we are asked to experience this work as being authentic. The work was published in 1995, and the snapshot style art-photograph didn’t have the credibility it has now. It wasn’t new, but the presentation of purely vernacular photography on the gallery wall was. Schmid argues that the snapshot is not about self-conscious story telling or manipulation. I could also argue that it is not about ironic or about commenting on the nature of re-presentation as a theoretical concept. There is something authentic about the images as the people who made these photographs believed in them for what they depicted within their everyday lives; there is no pretense that they might have value to other people in a broader context. The images are labeled with the date of the find and the place where Schmid picked them up, as they had reverted from being a precious object to suddenly being rejected. This enables us to locate Schmid as he has traveled Europe and America, to tell where he has been. We are also told that he does not edit the work, and he picks up all the images he finds. Schmid has not attempted making this work into something which is about his style as a practitioner.[iii] As Weber notes, he is more of a flaneur, scavenging from the street what other people have left behind.  

However, we are able to be sentimental about Schmid’s images. We can imagine what it must be like to have lost something that was such a profound part of our lives, or we can imagine the tensions that exist between people. But this sentimentality is not evident in FLOH. There are a few clues about editing and deleting: in one shot a person has been treated to a dose of blue pen to the face, erasure has been attempted. We can imagine a friendship betrayed, death or hatred, whatever we wish to project. However, the act of the pen feels brutal and violent rather than sentimental.

The images remain very special and I do experience something which could be defined as romantic. I feel as though the images are speaking to me from another place in time. Many of the people in this book have lived lives and died and I imagine feeling as Barthes did when he wrote Camera Lucida: that moment when he was pricked by an image. I can imagine these lives, but the real lives are lost to me. I can give voice to this loss or I can use this as a creative vehicle. The groups of images, cars in snow, people getting in and out of the cars, posing, waiting in front of the buildings. Another man appears twice with a cockatoo, a bird that is blurred. But my personal stories do not have to stop with their death or with the passing of the moment. My imaginings can give them a life with fullness, perhaps not deserved. People obviously don’t live in images; it is my imagination that can live through them.

I think the cropping goes beyond the erasure of ownership or authenticity though. It is a deliberate engagement with the question of art. It is often said that if you take enough photos that one day you will take a good one. However, as mentioned above, our ideas about what is a good photograph have changed over the years. We no longer need sharp focus, a long depth of field, frozen movement, correctly exposed or lit images to end up with a good image. Many of the photographs in FLOH stand testament to the changes in our aesthetic and conceptual agendas. They are unconscious versions of the work started by Lee Friedlander or Uta Barth. However, the alteration of the images takes these qualities and gives them an extra dimension. They become like film stills. There is something about the treatment of the subject and the framing that enables us to consider these images as works of art, but without losing the authentic edge that Schmid’s work contains. This factor is problematic to enunciate as there is a play between the images looking visually sophisticated and obviously not made self-consciously for the label of art. If we take for granted that it is the context that defines whether an image is art or not, then we have a clear answer: there are enough markers in the way the book FLOH is presented to accept it as art. What is so surprising is that the images have often have ceased looking like snap shots and look like images which are knowing about photography, the images seem to be able to cross this border and be both.  It may be that I am making stereotypical assumptions about how people with no photographic training make and compose images. It may also be the case that I am making stereotypical assumptions about what kinds of images end up in flea markets.

What I believe is emphasized by the activity of cropping is the beauty and absurdity of life. We have developed very sophisticated strategies and mechanisms for appreciating images, but not all mistakes made by amateur photographers are currently accepted as creative alternative ways of thinking about photography. The absurdity is important can be emphasized by the cropping, but it is not always the composition that makes something interesting. In one instance, we have a family photo taken in a field. Mother, father, son and daughter are there. However, the status of the family seems bizarre. They may be showing off their prize possessions: a cow and two horses, but it seems markedly strange that the girl is leading the cow and the boy and the father are riding the horses. The boy has his eyes closed and I find myself wondering whether the boy is alive. He also looks strangely out of place on such a grand beast: the horse stands proud and the mane has been cropped. The mother stands to the left of her son. We are left wondering why the bull is there at all, or what kind of relationship they have to each other as if the family exists in some hierarchy I am not able to perceive or understand.

The cropping is also revealed by the fact that the image sizes and proportions do not fit standard image formats. To take two images, presented side by side on opposite pages, the images form a pair and are the same shape. On first viewing I read these photographs as being of the same baby, but taken at different times as the baby is wearing different clothes. However, the longer I look, the more convinced I am that these are different babies taken in separate locations. The babies are about the same size and age, and they are both in front of a house that has a verandah. In neither instance is the baby in the middle of the image. Each image is identical in size and shape, and I think quite distinctly of a film format for the cinema. We are able to construct a narrative here as the baby seems to be moving towards us and then looks away from us. However, although there are an uncanny number of similarities between the two locations, one verandah seems to be in shadow on the right, as though there is an end it that is covered. The other verandah I read as being open-ended as there appears to be an abundance of light there.

With that in mind, I become aware of the fact that these observations could be wildly wrong: like people who sing along to a pop song for years and then find out they have been singing the wrong words for years. It could be the same location and the same baby, after all the wooden planks go in the same direction and there is an uncanny similarity between them. However, what I want to see lays beyond the frame, these images are not self contained. I am not satisfied with what I can see and I want to see more and know more. The authentic is being threatened with this desire to see more, to see beyond the frame, and I find this shift disturbing as the images were not made for this kind of treatment. However, these observations do not stop me from being imaginative. I can imagine the babies living on different continents and in different times, and it is bizarre and revealing that they look so much alike. The cropping has emphasized this ambiguity of whether the spaces are similar or identical, and I wonder whether I would have thought twice about this if more of the background could have been seen.

Shortly after this pair, in the same section are two more images. Neither look cropped but I feel they come from different times and places. There are formal similarities- both are the same size and format – I imagine the originals to be 6”x4”. The image on the left looks like a self-conscious photograph. The person who took this understood something about making images. A man stands outdoors against a smooth painted wall. He wears a dark coat in the sun, has his eyes closed and his head is titled up. His hair has been slighted lifted by the breeze. It is not your average snapshot of a friend or a member of the family. It has been taken with a sense of imagination.

The image next to it is of a butterfly on the snow: it looks like a Red Admiral. It is a special image as butterflies and snow are not normally seen at the same time. Again it does not suffer from the mistakes an amateur who doesn’t understand their camera would make. The butterfly is relatively small, but is in focus and there is no evidence of parallax error. The slight blueness of the white wall behind the man in the left hand image resonates with the blue snow behind the butterfly, and we have a sense of reverie from both images and from the juxtaposition. These images are well within many amateurs’ capabilities, but it is strange that they should turn up in a flea market – they just do not look old enough to be collectable.

Later in the book, we are confronted with another enigmatic image, that begs to be thought of as a film still. As viewers we are sitting in an empty café, looking across empty space, the lights don’t seem to be on and daylight comes through the windows opposite. The only two people there apart from us are a couple, dancing in the centre of the room. They seem to be as unaware of us as actors are unaware of a camera crew when the filming is happening. Because the café is deserted, because I feel like I’m intruding on a personal moment for no known reason, because the image is well composed and because of the unusual lack of colour for a colour photograph, the image seems sophisticated and I cannot imagine it as a snapshot. I feel I want to be told this is a professional image. It feels like a constructed or directed image, but it also has the same quietness as the other images and has a quality about it that does not fit in within the typical art market. There is no information for us to interpret or theorize about. We do not know these people or their reason for dancing in this closed cafe, with may be only one other observer. If this image is authentic as a snapshot, then it is remarkable and speaks to me of lost moments, and is one of the images that I can openly romance about. 

IV: Signs of Construction

My inability to believe this image as an authentic image, rather than one that has been constructed, is revealing about how we view photography today, and how we see images in the art context. It could be part of the project to reveal how absurd, beautiful and poignant moments exist everywhere and how we don’t have to be experts to find or notice them. My incredulousness is important as we live in a culture that has eroded the real and the authentic. One of the many shocking things that came out of the September 11^th attack on the Twin Towers was the fact that so many people who saw the television images discussed the footage as though it was a fictional film and found the events hard to comprehend as a fact.[iv]

In the art world though, this disbelief in the veracity of the image is not an uncommon thing. We are now used to thinking of all images as constructed. There are the limits of the frame, the cutting of the edges, the freezing of time and the selection of that specific moment, the choice of film stock, camera and film format, to mention a few. We also have the eye of the person taking the image and their own agenda will affect the image, whether we like it and whether they admit to it.

Having reached this stage of understanding it seems we are more comfortable when we can see the mechanisms of construction and the context of production, when we are unable to forget that we are looking at a manipulated image. I have always been struck by the lack of employed in relation to E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits which has been shown at the Photographer’s Gallery recently.[v] The prints are modern prints from vintage negatives, and the printer was Lee Friedlander: someone who really knows how to articulate the construction of the image within the image. Bellocq’s prints are not cropped and are presented full frame. This is bizarre as at the beginning of the book is an image of Bellocq’s study, where you can see the prints hanging on the wall. We can see that the prints have been made with a vignette and the surroundings of the sitter have been systematically excluded. The location and the effort of construction is visible in the Lee Friedlander presentation, and we are left with a very different view. In the images that exclude the surroundings the sitters look respectable, whereas they look naked and exposed in the modern presentation. They also sit within the realm of contemporary practice for exposing its won mechanisms of construction. Man Ray’s exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 1998 was handled in the same way. We are given a connoisseur’s chance to see how May Ray worked with the camera, and we are able to see more of the context in which the photographer was working, but this is at the expense of the magic of the image being lost.[vi] It’s like knowing too much about the special effects in movies; we are no longer able to suspend disbelief.

I am suffering from the opposite problem here though. In Dean’s work, the signs of construction are hidden, and what I have spent all this time doing is looking for them and unearthing them. I may even have spent a considerable amount of time imagining them. We are stuck between our incredulousness and the apparent authenticity. Whether we chose to believe in the authenticity of the image, as the absurd and the quirky are not prerogatives of the rich and the educated, there is an image at the end that leads me to believe that this debate is meant to be happening.

It is a separate image and is the last one in the book. It is the only image to stand entirely on its own. It is a remarkable image in that it features a man looking at a scene in the distance. On the one hand he could be a tourist, after all, he does have a view of the town in the background. But there are too many incongruities; the scene in the background is covered with snow, and I wonder where his winter coat is. The town looks 19^th Century; there are no signs of modern life, or of people for that matter. On closer inspection we can see the background is painted and the man is probably standing on a diorama set. I am immediately reminded of Sugimoto’s images of dioramas in museums and the surreal and yet ultra-real quality his images possess.[vii] I could choose to ponder whether Dean has made this image, or whether it was made by another critical practitioner, or by an institution. I could question whether the image came from a flea market at all. But all of this is immaterial – as an image in this context it still reflects on the presence of construction, on our inability to suspend disbelief but our desire to see the simulated as a matter of course in our daily lives. This is where the contradiction between the work being fixed and unfixed becomes poignant. The last image was taken in a museum context, and a museum is something which collects and orders objects and images. So the last image is an image which reflects on the presentation of a collection while being in the collection. It looks at the construction and simulation and gently reveals the terms of its existence. The same could be said of the book: it is a collection of simulations but is also reveals, when closely examined, the conditions of its existence. The image doesn’t represent Dean as personae, but the collector. It feels like a gentle and fitting end to the book. It doesn’t prescribe how to see the work, or upset the opportunity for being imaginative but it does in itself give us something to think about and secondly, it does tell us about the conditions of its existence. We have here the presentation of a collection, one that is idiosyncratic to be sure.

FLOH compares very highly to the collections of Martin Parr which are used to reinforce his image as a “train spotter” and as someone who thoroughly engages in popular kitsch in the interests of his practice: owning popular kitsch enables him to consolidate his practice as a commentator on popular kitsch. The presentation of FLOH however, does not confirm or deny what we know about Dean’s practice. It is a subtle and eloquent book, something that is as solid as any of her short films. It is Dean’s wish that FLOH return to the flea market. It will not be used to confirm the character of Dean in relation to her practice. With any luck the work will not be found intact in the way that Bellocq’s work has been or Charles Jones’.

What upsets the construction and fluidity of this temporary museum though, is the fact that there are still four thousand copies of this book in circulation. And with her signature and the number of copies stated at the front of the book, we are not able to abandon the authorial voice. The book stands testament to the project of collecting and editing and making something which ultimately has an overall scheme. The boot itself is an enigma and it seems that we need to question whether it can be both a project and a temporary collection.

V: Liberated from the Drudgery of Usefulness

            FLOH sets up a double position in relation to authorship. Dean is both the author of this work and the collector. There are a number of ways of thinking about collecting, and most of them have unpleasant overtones. However, using Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on collecting in “Unpacking my Library” we have an opportunity to see the collector’s point of view. He states that a collection is a “whimsical” activity where the objects are liberated from the “drudgery of usefulness”. He refers to the objects in a collection being cut from their context and original use. In relation to his own library which prompted the essay, he admits that many of his books have not been read by himself. To read them is not the point of collecting them. The cutting from context and changing the use of the collection certainly applies to Dean’s project – the original usefulness of these images only applies to those who made the images and those who know the people and the places imaged. Dean gives us a new purpose for the images, but it is a playful one, and it is for us to decide what it has. Museums tend to do the same thing: the object is stripped of its context and an aesthetic appreciation is put in its place. While the material terms of production are important to understand Benjamin makes a virtue of this lack of context. Hannah Arendt found a context for this process itself. Here she speaks in relation to Benjamin’s library:

… the break in tradition which takes place at the beginning of the century – had already relieved him of his task of destruction and he only needed to bend down, as it were, to select his precious fragments from the pile of debris. [viii]

 Arendt spots that the act of destruction had already been enacted by the society around Benjamin and he only had fragments to work with. Likewise it is obvious that the images Dean have been using from the flea market have already been torn from their context of the family album or for whatever other institution they have been made; images which have value for us generally are not given away to flea markets, but kept as sacred objects. Dean is able to use the images in this imaginative and playful way because they are already taken out of context, and the work becomes a meditation on the collection itself. The final image provides a context for the rest of the work: the diorama and museum function as a self conscious, simulated but not totally convincing construction, much like the other images in the book.

            Douglas Crimp, however, uses Benjamin’s ideas for a different, less romantic emphasis. Crimp, in “On the Museum’s Ruins” examines the use value of the collection, how it is there to educate about objects, to the exclusion of how they came into being. Even a private collection has use as it confers status upon the owner, and as discussed above, can confirm the preoccupations of the collector in order to emphasize their authorship. Museums also hide what is material about the here and now and how they manage to exist and collect. But Dean, to some extent, has had this problem solved for her. In the flea market, where collecting can be cheap, the context has gone. The context of production is hidden or lost anyway. The conditions of production of this book are disguised, but that’s also what makes it a challenge for the reader to look at. 

            Authorship still sits in an uncomfortable position to this work, but it’s not hugely productive to criticize someone for the conditions under which they work. To take a materialist approach to this work, it needs an author as a concept to exist, to be sold and circulated. With any luck, with print sales (from the accompanying exhibition at Frith Street Gallery) and from sales of her other film works, and any commissions she might obtain, Dean might just be making a living from her art, and this is not such a bad thing to aspire to. We no longer have the Church to commission art or patrons of the art; we don’t even have a real public funding system. Is it any wonder that artists work within the private gallery system in order to make art? The art market does have it’s own values and vanities, but it is all too easy to talk about the corrupting influence of a market upon an artists work (as if one would want to aspire to working in a vacuum anyway.) And the idea of the romantic, independent artist has itself been subject to deconstruction and apparently no such thing exists.

I also think the making of this book has given the images a new lease of life as it exists in a way that pictures in a shoe box would never have. With Dean’s intervention we are entertained and provoked.

            Resolving contradictions is usually a difficult business and if it is any consolation at this point, Benjamin himself said that “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.” If this is true, Dean’s collection is highly likely to re-enter the stream of the flea market or to be reinvented by another owner. The book will remain articulate in the conditions of it’s own existence: authored, collected, self-consciously constructed and aware of its conditions of existence. We have all the pointers: the signature, the name, the cropped images and the image about the museum at the end. It stands to reason why nothing has been written about this book. Firstly, all the clues are there for us to see and it is a challenge for us to perceive and understand them. Secondly, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Dean used Benjamin’s essay as a way of structuring and presenting the work. But to tell us that would give the game away and prevent us from making our own journey through the work. To tell us everything at the start of the project shuts down our responses to the images and the way it is structured. To have something so concrete as an essay at the front of the book would put a greater stress on authorship and could prevent the work from returning to the flea market, it would firmly place the work in the realm of the academic. The book will always remain authored, but in the quietest possible manner.

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