Targets

A pointed artist's book by the New York artist Anne Doran, Targets holds two vocabularies of the aimed-at body in a single frame: vintage pornography stills seamlessly collaged with the human-silhouette practice targets of the shooting range.

Across forty-eight digitally printed color pages, the black target silhouettes — their scoring numbers and manufacturer's imprint left legible — are cut into and overlaid with anonymous nudes, so that zones of desire and zones of aim coincide. Published in New York by Ratstar Press in 2018 as a perfect-bound paperback, the book presents one collage per page, plate-style, and examines, in the publisher's phrasing, how the body can be a target for action and a catalyst for power.

Doran's appropriation-based photo-collage practice dates to New York in the mid-1980s her Photo-works (1985–1991), revisited in a later gallery survey, drew on the same found-image economy of advertising, pornography, and print ephemera that Targets distills to its starkest pairing.