Two of Us
This 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.
Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY 2007
Black and white, perfect bound paperback. ISBN 0-89822-097-1. 424 pages. more images
“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.”
Chris Burnett in ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ Afterimage, vol. 35 no. 3, November 2007.
Listen to an interview about this book on Dutch radio.
