Museum
This is our first hardcover photobook — very special.
I see your book as you probably see it—not as a group of individual images, but as a sequence, modulated by personal curiosity, modulated by pace. Traipsing through a museum, displaced as Museum.
Indeed, I think you see museum-goers as museum administrators now see them—just streaks of light and density moving through (gallery) space. I say that satirically because you see the virtue of the passage of light within architectures of contemplation whereas the administrators see it as a quantitative bounty, an admission of admission price.
Interestingly, when you do depict art-goers in a semirealistic dimension, it's usually mirrored in narcissistic doublings and triplings. So when we can “see” them, they are not contemplating the art, just their personal proximity to the stature that museums confer.
The hidden dimension also resides in a museum-historical realm—that art is eternal but the art-goers are evanescent. Substance lies elsewhere.
I also spotted a few self-portraits, captured in inescapable reflection. Maybe one of them sited inside the Stan VanDerBeek "Movie Drome."
—Steve Seid, retired museum curator