Our Eidolon Shelf project has relocated to Művház, Budapest where it is now available for visitors to explore. This new location features a curated selection of photo-books and photography theory literature, handpicked by us to inspire and inform anyone interested in the art and history of everyday photographic practices and contemporary visual culture. Whether you are a photographer or an avid reader, the Eidolon Shelf at Művház offers a unique resource for discovering both classic and contemporary works in the field.
Our recommendation for this month is Centerfold by Carly Ries!
Ries invites us into a provocative and tender visual exploration that reimagines the practice of working with archival materials. Based in New York, Ries is the curator of the Peter J. Cohen Collection—a trove of over 60,000 vernacular photographs, organised into more than 130 categories. This intimate familiarity with the photographic archive informs her own practice, which explores the complex ways we look at others, who gets to tell the story visible on the images, and what we find ourselves drawn to in them.
Constructed from interwoven scenes of vintage softcore magazines, collaborative portraits, and still lifes, the book queers its source material through touch and sequence. Images originally produced by men for the pleasure of other men – specifically, girl-on-girl magazines from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s – are lifted from their original contexts and placed into new visual dialogues.
Rather than isolating sources, Ries brings together her own photographs with selections from the Peter J. Cohen Collection and appropriated imagery. The result is a non-linear narrative – fragmented yet coherent, playful yet charged – that examines the performative relationships between photographer and subject, and the slippery boundaries between documentation and desire.
Through its tactile sequences and radical recontextualisations, this book asks us to reconsider who looks, who is seen, and how those roles might be rewritten.
Publisher: Picture Speak
Year: 2023
Pages: 116
Language: English
Price: 14.690 HUF
Grab your books at Művház:
1114, Budapest, Bartók Béla út 33.
Opening Hours:
Monday to Sunday: 9 am-10pm
