A History of Photography

This book is in the form of a box of flashcards. It contains 41 cards (40 plates and one colophon), and an eight-page accordion folded essay booklet.Inside this box, you will find an edited, reinterpreted, recontextualized, and humorous slice of photographic history. This work was produced in a moment of elongated reflection during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Four photographers, comprising the Rolls & Tubes Collective, examined the events unfolding around them and, through a...
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This book is in the form of a box of flashcards. It contains 41 cards (40 plates and one colophon), and an eight-page accordion folded essay booklet.Inside this box, you will find an edited, reinterpreted, recontextualized, and humorous slice of photographic history. This work was produced in a moment of elongated reflection during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Four photographers, comprising the Rolls & Tubes Collective, examined the events unfolding around them and, through a collaborative effort made images in response.Every one of these images pulls from the history of photography, utilizing the classical canon along with pieces that were perhaps overlooked by historians. In response to the ongoing pandemic shortages, the Rolls & Tubes Collective members individually selected photographs to restage with toilet paper as the main foil in each composition. The new pieces reveal another history; one that originates within each Collective member's personal experience with the history of photography. As photographers with distinct backgrounds, the history of photography was a part of their formal training, but each member encountered a changing roster of photographers in the canon dependent on when and where they encountered it. Along with that, the act of looking at images is intrinsically embedded in their processes, exploding the history outward in all directions. It speaks to how photographic history (or really any history) does not have a defined form; the shape changes and shifts over time. Together, the photographs in flashcard form provide one malleable history. Enjoy this history. It is just one history out of many; perhaps it will inspire you to think about your own.The cards in this box are being delivered to you in orderof their appearance in the history of photography. Feel free toreorganize them in the way you would prefer it to havehappened. In these pictures we have indulged that impulse again and again.