The photographer's art of arrangement: a book of constructed pages
from the author of My Birth
This book of multivalent narratives began with a simple premise: the
collection of sheets of paper--ripped from books--featuring multiple
photographs and inlaid narratives. Across a decade of working on other
projects involving pulling images apart from one another, excising them
from the page and recontextualizing them as new sets, American artist
Carmen Winant diligently collected disparate sheets, skimming them off
the top of her other ongoing collections. The book that has resulted
from that work is wide-ranging in terms of subject--with sheets
depicting rabbinical study, dog training, surgical birth, methods of
tantric sex, patterns of the sunset--yet specific in approach and
application. Her constructed pages trouble how the idea of "theme"
operates as the engine of a book, instead taking the act of arranging,
both in discrete pages and as a whole, as its own meaningful subject.
Arrangements, a book without explanatory text, might be understood as
offering design solutions, proposing strategies of recycling and
recovery, and demonstrating modes of sociality through systems of
photographic organization.
Carmen Winant (born 1983) is an artist and writer and currently
holds a position at Ohio State University as the Roy Lichtenstein
Endowed Chair of Studio Art. She is the author of several artist books
including My Birth and Instructional Photography, and was a
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2019 and a Pew
Center for Arts & Heritage grant in 2020. Winant lives and works in
Columbus, OH with her two sons, Carlo and Rafa, and her partner, Luke
Stettner.
