The Naked Eye

Erica Baum photographs the fanned, aging edges of paperback books rather than their covers or spines, and this 2015 monograph gathers the first full survey of that ongoing series, begun in 2008.

Published by Crevecoeur in Paris with Bureau in New York, the 144-page hardcover reproduces fifty-eight color photographs in an edition of 1,200, designed by Myriam Barchechat. Baum turns old softcovers on their side, so the camera catches strips of colored page edges and slivers of interrupted text instead of a legible page. Two essays frame the work: Jean-Max Colard's "Filmo-Biographemes" and Cathleen Chaffee's "Erica Baum's Contemporary," reading the photographs against a wider history of picture-text collision in her practice.

Baum has spent two decades mining overlooked printed sources, from library card catalogs to art-historical indices and antique parlor games, for the fragments of language and image lodged inside them. The Naked Eye pushes that method to its most abstract point, cropped so tightly that the books themselves nearly disappear, leaving only color, edge, and the trace of type. Chaffee calls the result a photographic present, gone the instant the shutter closes.