Sweet

Sweet is the point at which Aaron McElroy sets aside the muted colour and diaristic drift of his earlier work and reduces the nude to line, form and the coarse grain of a laser print.

Published in 2015 by S_U_N, the photographers' cooperative McElroy helped found, the book gathers older and recent nudes in black and white. It is his first to work exclusively that way. The figure is handled as much through the texture of the printing as through the exposure: the off-register tones and flattened blacks of laser output are part of the picture rather than a compromise in reproducing it. Fifty-one pages, 21 x 28 cm, wire-bound in a plain yellow cover with the title set alone in italic, in an edition of 50 copies.

Sweet opens what McElroy calls the Sugar series, completed by Candy later in 2015 and Sugar in 2016 — three books that together survey the nudes his practice is built on. His work has circulated largely through Dashwood Books in New York and through small-run publication rather than trade distribution, and the imprint has been listed variously out of New York and Los Angeles.