Organic Chemistry of Photography Book

Beautifully produced book nearly uniformly black from cover to cover with suggestive and erotic splashes of somewhat lighter tone in the soft-focus and grainy photographs. Here and there are glints of true white: a ring, a paper cup, something perhaps liquid. Each picture invites the observer to enter in, or at least remember when he was in a similar situation himself. The photographic art here is nearly palpable.

Poet Richard Howard's afterward "Beholden for Beholding" (printed on dark grey paper: white would ruin the effect) fits the atmosphere perfectly, setting the work within the larger context of participatory voyeurism and gay sexual desire. "By day we are negligible, by night we are ourselves: so speak the personnel haunting these impermissible images, wherein nothing is product, everything process. These 'shots' are the unacknowledged trajectory of certain events whose sublimity is secured only by their enactment, never by their objectification."

Black...oh so black...swimming at night in the daytime.