Crystal Clear

Crystal Clear is a dense, physically saturated survey of Maya Rochat's photographic practice, in which images of water, rock and body are pushed through chemical intervention and re-photography until they dissolve toward abstraction.

Across 320 pages the Swiss artist layers analog darkroom experimentation, spray paint, bleach and re-scanning over documentary source photographs. The result is a visual language in which landscape and body function as raw material rather than subject. The book, published by Edition Patrick Frey as volume no. 156 in the Zurich house's long-running series of artist monographs, is designed as an immersive, large-format object. It mirrors the saturated, layered quality of the images themselves rather than presenting them as a clean, sequential portfolio.

Rochat (b. 1985, Lausanne) works across photography, installation, sculpture and sound. She has developed a body of work centered on the material transformation of the photographic image, exhibiting internationally including at Fotomuseum Winterthur and Foam Amsterdam. Crystal Clear consolidates a decade of that practice into the artist's most extensive book to date.