Unknown #2: Tentative d'épuisement d'un livre

Unknown #2: Tentative d'épuisement d'un livre is Stéphane Duroy's account of a single book he could not stop remaking, turning a discontinued edition of his own photography into an open-ended material process.

In 2007 Filigranes published Duroy's Unknown, photographs from his trips across the United States. A printing flaw left him with roughly a hundred unsellable copies, and in 2009 he began working back into them with collage, press cuttings, anonymous photographs and abstract painting, tearing and rebuilding the original pages. Between 2009 and 2017 this produced twenty-eight distinct book-objects. Unknown #2, a 64-page bilingual leporello with 63 color photographs, gathers this reworking and was co-produced with Le Bal for the exhibition Again and Again, shown at Le Bal and the Espace Photographique Leica in Paris in early 2017.

Duroy began as a press photographer for the Sipa agency before turning to long-term documentary projects on Thatcher-era England, divided Berlin and its aftermath, and the United States, work recognized with a World Press Photo award. Unknown #2 marks a turn from documentary photography toward the book itself as a site of ongoing revision.