Four Thousand Threads

Dick Jewell's Four Thousand Threads is a survey of the artist's decades-long habit of collecting and arranging found and appropriated photographs, brought together as digital photography multiplied the volume of images in circulation.

The book groups pictures, drawn from the artist's own archive and from the wider flow of images shared online, into visual "threads": recurring gestures, poses and scenarios such as planking, upside-down stunts, or people photographed with animals, laid out across the page in dense grids. Jewell has described his long-standing interest as being not in single images but in the relationships between them, and the book extends that interest to internet-driven photographic trends. It was self-published by the artist in London in 2015 as a large-format paperback.

Jewell has worked since the 1970s across photography, film and collage, repeatedly returning to vernacular and found imagery (party photobooths, tourist snapshots, amateur pornography) as raw material; Four Thousand Threads continues that practice into the era of social media and mass image-sharing.