Part II: Violence, Machines, and Bodies

All photography is theft; one of the few interests my Father and I shared in the mid-1960's was the TV program ‘Secret Agent’ starring a bemused turtle-necked Patrick McGoohan as British intelligence operative John Drake. I always took notice whenever his character darted in and out of someone's office to photograph documents or ‘secret plans’ by means of a discrete miniature camera the size of a fountain pen or pack of cigarettes. Our iphone now includes all the exotic spyware one may need to scan or record any document, conversation, or activity.

I am no bibliophile but I love books and have for decades impulsively photographed texts, images, and individual words from whatever I happened to be reading. I am hardly alone in this, many artists boldly ((in 80's Po-Mo lingo) ‘appropriated’ while other scholar/practitioners function as archivists or have taken the book itself as subject. I suspect that there is a element of nostalgia operating here with our immediate present revolving around fragments of text and images melting in and out of screens.

This edition of DIVISION/Review hosts 15 of my own images culled from hundreds taken over the decades several of which are from the early 90's when the future of the publication as a bound physical object began to look doubtful in the ascension of all things digital. What was I trying to achieve in performing this furtive act? A picture of a word still reads as the same word even when extracted from the page and memorialized. I think I relished the role play which the camera, a once formidable device allowed in its usage-I could morph from industrial spy one day to mod fashion photographer the next drifting through a London park. Happily books flourished as evidenced by the many fairs that operate as a DIY alternative to the air-kissing blue chip desperation of Art Basel or Frieze—the receptive blank page of any publication is as viable an art context as a Chelsea wall. Embedded throughout D/R (so wonderfully orchestrated by