Parallel Encyclopedia

Parallel Encyclopedia is Batia Suter's first major work of visual taxonomy: a 590-page compendium built from photographs appropriated out of secondhand books and other printed sources. Suter arranges the images by formal resemblance rather than by their original subject, so a photograph of a rock formation, a human vertebra, and an aerial survey can share a spread because their shapes echo one another, not because their disciplines do.

The book keeps the encyclopedia's apparatus, pagination and an index at the back, while stripping the captions and sources that once anchored each picture to a discipline. Freed of that context, images drawn from natural history, anatomy, architecture, and ethnography sit in conversation through visual analogy alone, turning a reference format built for classification into an open-ended sequence of associations. Roma Publications issued it in Amsterdam in 2007 as ROMA no. 100, a single hardcover volume.

The book established the method Suter has returned to across her career: editing existing photographic archives into new sequences rather than making new photographs. She followed it with an independent second volume, Parallel Encyclopedia #2, in 2016.