Frank Peter John Dick (2011) is the debut publication of American artist K8 Hardy, collecting photo collages she assembled privately, over several years, from magazines, advertisements, and found photographs as working research for her performance and photographic practice.
The book reproduces the collages largely as made: cut-and-glued fragments of fashion editorials, newsprint headlines, darkroom test strips, and junk-store snapshots, layered into studies of representation, style, and queer identity. Its cover assembles broken male first names — Frank, Peter, John, Richard, Steve, Gary, Robert — literalizing the title as found-text collage. Never made for exhibition, the material became a book only after studio visitors urged Hardy to publish it Capricious released it as 52 full-color, perfect-bound pages, with an essay by Eileen Myles and endnotes by the artist identifying her sources.
Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas) co-founded the queer feminist collective and journal LTTR in 2002 and holds an MFA from Bard College (2008). This collage practice underlies the photography, sculpture, and performance for which she is better known, including the Position Series photographs and her 2012 Whitney Biennial runway performance her work is held in the Whitney, Guggenheim, and MoMA collections, and she is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art.
Notes
PUBLISHER CORRECTION: the task brief supplied 'Galerie Aurel Scheibler' as the publisher this was verified and found to be incorrect. Galerie Aurel Scheibler's own 'artists represented' page does not list K8 Hardy, and no source (Wikipedia, OpenLibrary, Archive.org, Printed Matter, Art Metropole, Quimby's, Antenne Books, Good Press, Blackwell's, Waterstones, Amazon) connects the gallery to this title. All independent sources agree the actual publisher is Capricious (New York small press/arts foundation, now operating as Capricious Foundation), 2011. Title spelling/word order confirmed as 'Frank Peter John Dick' (not 'Frank Peter Dick John', which appears as an apparent typo in one caption on capriciousfoundation.org's own press page, contradicted by the BOMB Magazine article it links to and by every retailer/library source). Page count listed as 52 by most retailers and 51 by Art Metropole used 52 as the majority figure. K8 Hardy has no dedicated portfolio site beyond a small Hostinger-built shop site (k8hardy.com) selling a 'studio dress' and linking to her film, LTTR, and museum pages — used as authors[0].url since it is genuinely hers (verified via linked works/collective/YouTube channel), but it is thin as a bio resource. No dimensions in cm given as height x width by any source height_cm/width_cm inferred from cover image aspect ratio (448x600 px, ratio 0.747) matched against the stated 23 x 30 cm sheet size (ratio 0.767), giving width_cm=23, height_cm=30 (portrait).
