Mark Morrisroe

This monograph is the fullest survey of Mark Morrisroe's photography, drawing together his Polaroids, hand-colored and chemically manipulated prints, sandwich photographs, and slide projections. It is the first comprehensive account of an artist who died of AIDS-related illness in 1989 at thirty.

Published by JRP|Ringier in 2011 to accompany the retrospective organized by Fotomuseum Winterthur (November 2010-February 2011), which traveled to Artists Space in New York and Villa Stuck in Munich. The 516-page book was edited by Beatrix Ruf and Thomas Seelig. It includes essays by Linda Yablonsky, Fionn Meade, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Stuart Comer. It reproduces Morrisroe's technically experimental printing methods at length: his "sandwich prints" combining two negatives, his use of expired and scavenged photo paper, and the deliberate chemical staining and burning he applied to his own negatives.

Morrisroe (1959-1989) came up through the Boston art scene of the late 1970s alongside Nan Goldin and David Armstrong before moving to New York. There, his self-portraits, portraits of lovers and friends, and staged tableaux became central documents of the East Village art and punk scene. His deliberately degraded, hand-worked prints anticipated much of the interest in photographic materiality and process that later photographers have pursued, and this book, along with the 2010-2012 retrospective, was largely responsible for restoring him to that history.