Arrangements

Arrangements is a book by the Portland photographer Clayton Cotterell, published by Ampersand Editions and titled for his series of photographs that find abstraction in the everyday world.

Ampersand showed the Arrangements photographs at its gallery from 25 September to 24 October 2013. Its exhibition text describes encounters with light, color and form that range across the world without being about any particular place. The titles are plain and name the subject: a pole, a telephone cord, a towel. Printed Matter’s 2014 New York Art Book Fair program listed Cotterell signing copies of the book at a signing presented by Ampersand. In his artist’s statement he calls the series a call and response with the environments, objects and moments around him.

Cotterell lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and took an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2008. Ampersand had earlier published his monograph Unarmed, on his brother’s passage from boyhood to manhood as a mechanic and private who served in Afghanistan.