October

Ren Hang's October is another installment in the self-published monthly photo-book project the Chinese photographer and poet ran through 2016, releasing a new booklet each month for a year.

The 44-page softcover gathers photographs made in Beijing that October, continuing the deadpan, sculptural nude studies that define the series: bodies knotted into tight, geometric arrangements against plain backdrops, printed without captions or supporting text. It was distributed independently in a first edition of 100 copies, the way most of his books reached readers before larger publishers took an interest.

Ren Hang (1987-2017) photographed friends and acquaintances nude and semi-nude, treating the body as raw material for tableaux that were frank about desire while sidestepping pornography's conventions. His images circulated online and in self-published books like this one years before institutions such as the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, and the Kansas State University art museum acquired his work, and before Taschen issued a posthumous retrospective monograph in 2020.