On Your Knees, Please.

Raquel Nave works with her own body as her subject, and On Your Knees, Please. is one of a run of self-published books in which she turns the camera on herself.

First issued in 2014 and reprinted in softcover in New York in 2015, the book belongs to a sequence of small self-published volumes — Live Free In Hell (2010, through BCCKS), this title, and S.A.D. (2015) — made outside any publishing house and circulated through photography bookshops such as Dashwood Books in New York. The photographs are self-portraits, and Nave uses her own image to work on questions of identity, sexuality and, later, motherhood; the books are the form the work takes rather than a record of work made elsewhere.

Nave is an artist, actor and model based in New York, working across photography, video and performance. She has appeared in Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York and Bizarre and in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and has been photographed for editorial work by Ellen von Unwerth, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Rankin among others. In PIG (2019) she moved to digital and turned the camera off herself and onto her partner, the first of her books to look outward.