One Picture Book #83: Witness

Dan Solomon's Witness radically crops stills from the Zapruder film and the Moorman Polaroid, isolating the bystanders who watched the Kennedy assassination unfold rather than the event itself.

By decontextualizing individual and grouped figures from Dealey Plaza's most examined footage, Solomon turns two of the most scrutinized images in American photographic history into a study of witnessing itself: how memory dims, how an eyewitness account slips, and how a camera's claim to record objective fact erodes the more closely its frames are parsed. The book is #83 in Nazraeli Press's One Picture Book series, a run of uniform, casebound 5.5 x 7.25 inch volumes, each built around a single artist's cohesive body of work across 16 pages. This edition is limited to 500 numbered copies, each bound with 7 four-color plates and accompanied by one original signed photograph by the artist.

Dan Solomon (b. 1957) is better known as a photography collector and curator than as a working photographer: his personal collection of roughly 250 prints, spanning early photography to contemporary practice, is now held by the National Gallery of Art, and he has curated historical and contemporary exhibitions including surveys of Muybridge, Stieglitz, and Atget. Witness is a rare instance of Solomon working as an artist rather than a collector, using his connoisseur's eye for archival material to interrogate the reliability of the photographic record.