Jack Pierson
A pocket-sized book on Jack Pierson published by Photology, the Milan photography gallery that has represented his photographs since 1999, on the occasion of his solo exhibition there in the spring of 2001. Barely bigger than a postcard, it carries nothing on its cover but the artist's name and the title, and nothing else anywhere: no ISBN or barcode, and none of the usual publishing apparatus. The gallery's own later listing describes it simply as its pocket size edition.
The artist's official bibliography credits the volume with a text by the poet Eileen Myles, Pierson's longtime friend and interpreter. The intimate scale suits his registers: longing, faded glamour, male beauty and out-of-focus American light. Photology returned to the artist around 2008 with a larger ISBN'd hardcover surveying some sixty works across media this small, early volume is its predecessor.
Pierson (b. 1960, Plymouth, Massachusetts) emerged from the Boston School alongside Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe, and is best known for photographs steeped in longing and faded Americana and for the word sculptures, begun in 1991, that he assembles from salvaged signage letters. His Self-Portrait series appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial long represented by Cheim & Read, he now shows with Lisson Gallery.
