Dirty Scenes

Dirty Scenes gathers twenty collage plates by the Belgian artist Katrien De Blauwer, published by the Stockholm press Libraryman in 2019 as a first edition of 400 numbered and signed copies.

The images began as an accident during work on De Blauwer's companion book Why I Hate Cars and grew into a detached supplement in their own right: anonymous figures, their faces cut away or obscured, set against paint strokes, cardboard scraps, and pencil marks layered over vintage photographic sources. Edited and designed by Tony Cederteg, the 40-page softcover is saddle-stitched and housed in a grey paperboard slipcase with black foil-stamped typography, browsed Japanese-style from left to right. The book accompanied De Blauwer's exhibition Love Me Tender at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris, May 18–June 15, 2019.

De Blauwer (b. 1969, Ronse, Belgium) calls herself "a photographer without a camera," building her collages entirely from found and recut printed images rather than original photography. Dirty Scenes sits alongside her other Libraryman titles — Why I Hate Cars, When I Was a Boy, You Could at Least Pretend to Like Yellow — as part of a body of work centered on memory, anonymity, and appropriated photography.