Unusual View of Unknown Subjects

Unusual View of Unknown Subjects is the first book by the Swiss artist Simon Rimaz (b. 1987), winner of the Unseen Dummy Award in 2014. It excavates American press-photo archives by cutting away exactly what was published, leaving only the discarded margins of each picture.

Working from press prints gathered in United States newspaper archives, Rimaz follows the stigmata of publication (grease-pencil crop marks, strike-outs, stamps and index annotations) and excises the portion of the photograph the public actually saw. What remains is the picture's unseen perimeter: an inversion that turns editorial cropping into a cutting tool and asks what a photograph's claim to depict "that-which-has-been" still amounts to once its subject is removed. Lecturis, Eindhoven published the 144-page, 24 × 30 cm paperback in 2015, the year after the dummy won at Unseen Amsterdam the design, by Pierre Girardin with the artist, wraps the book in the black marker kill-marks of the archive itself.

Rimaz lives and works in Lausanne, trained at the Vevey School of Photography (CEPV), and works across photography, sculpture, installation and video. He has had solo exhibitions at Photoforum PasquArt, Biel, and Galerie Forma, Lausanne, and his work is held by Photo Elysée, Lausanne. In the collage collection his surgical excisions of found photographs sit naturally beside John Stezaker's cut film stills, the same act of removal doing the work of picturing.