Pictures of Pictures

Pictures of Pictures is Sara Cwynar's early taxonomy of found photographic ephemera, a slim artist's zine that previews the archival, image-about-images method that would define her later work.

Published through Printed Matter's Emerging Artists Publication Series in 2014 in an edition of 350, the fold-only booklet gathers photographs Cwynar found in discarded printed matter, camera advertisements, darkroom manuals, instructional pamphlets, arranged in an indexical, yearbook-like grid and bound in navy bookcloth with a gold foil-stamped cover. Drawing on Roland Barthes's writing on photography's "that-has-been," the sequence foregrounds the way a picture both revives and mourns its vanished subject.

Made while Cwynar was beginning her MFA at Yale, Pictures of Pictures belongs to a run of independently published books, including Kitsch Encyclopedia, that established the research-driven, image-archaeology approach she later expanded into large-scale photographic installations and, in 2021, the Aperture monograph Glass Life.