How do you review a book like Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off? Maybe a good way to start is to note that, yes, that is indeed the title of the book: Queen Ann P.S. Belly Cut Off, and if you look at the publisher’s description, you will learn where/how to order the book, plus a whole lot more about the book itself: I was going to write that “the suggestive, intimate force of the ‘found’ photographic material and other personal documents, as well as the sequencing of the images as a whole, are both deliberately arranged with great precision,” but, alas!, the publisher beat me to it! (more)

All joking aside, Queen Ann was produced by Mariken Wessels, a Dutch artist. If you’ve followed this blog over the past few months, this fact will not come as a surprise to you: The Netherlands are the world’s innovative center of independent photo book publishing. Queen Ann features a lot of found/appropriated photographs, centered on a single woman, with time progressing. The artist’s hand is not as obvious as it would seem: It is not clear whether the various modifications of the photographs were already present in the sources or whether they were added after the fact. What is more, the source imagery is also not presented like a simple album; instead, there seem to be many details - or are those stills from movies? It’s never quite clear what one should make of what there is - for the viewer, there is a space to fill, the story is not clear, it almost seems there might be more than one story.

This is what makes a good photo book: A body of work that allows space for interpretation, that can live, no: that has to exist with uncertainty, with not everything being well-defined, a body of work that knows that a narrative that does not involve the viewer’s imagination is little more than a comic strip.

I don’t want to sound as if all I cared about now are independently produced photo books, or books by small publishers. That is not the case. What I do see, though, is that smaller/independent publishers are more willing to take a risk, to move away from the gallery show on paper that I lamented about a while ago, and Queen Ann is a great example. If Queen Ann was exhibited in a gallery I’d imagine it would be a messy collage on the wall, along with all kinds of things - instead of the usual row of neatly framed photographs on a white wall.

Recommended.

Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off, appropriated photography by Mariken Wessels, 80 pages, including glassine envelope containing photos, alauda publications, 2010