McVarish, Emily: Was Here “Was Here" takes photography and the book as distinct metaphors for History, playing them off one another to provoke and unwind their respective implications. As markers of a former presence and constellations of the unfulfilled, photographs punch holes in the book’s inherent pretenses of organicism and linearity, calling attention to the citational nature of the book’s very element, language. On the other hand, with its potential to carry out alternation and repetition over paginated time, a book can make tangible the temporal and ontological paradoxes at the heart of every photographic image. With obvious compositional and material attention to the medium (letterpress) in which both texts and photographs—labels and vignettes, captions and scenes, statements and evidence—are presented, Was Here seeks signs of the historical truths that link reproducibility and transcendence. en., letterpress, cloth over boards, 64p, 10.8 x 13.3 inch, Ed. of 50, num., sign., New York, 2001, Granary Books Request of availability backnext