Tertium Quid

Tertium Quid is Murray Moss's book of paired vintage press photographs, each image set beside another with which it forms an unplanned visual rhyme, a "third thing" produced by the meeting of two unrelated pictures.

Drawing on his personal archive of anonymous mid-century press photographs, Moss arranges the pictures in pairs he describes as duets, fugues, or conversations between strangers, reproducing each photograph at its original size with its annotated, stamped verso given equal weight to the printed front. August Editions published the 204-page hardcover in 2014 in a numbered edition of 1,250, with roughly 200 duotone reproductions across pairings that range from formal echo to pure coincidence.

Moss founded the SoHo design shop Moss in 1994 and spent a decade reshaping how American stores presented industrial design as a curatorial practice before turning, in later years, to collecting and recontextualizing vernacular press photography. Tertium Quid extends that same curatorial eye, pairing rather than authorship, to a body of found images whose original photographers and subjects are almost entirely anonymous.