As the season turns, I bring you three compelling books that explore the multifaceted and often bizarre nature of the human form. Each publication delves into the presence and absence of the body in space, its potential for liberation, and its performative capacity to communicate beyond words. From a dancer’s quest for self-discovery to an artist’s investigation of masculinity, these books uncover the deep connections between our physical selves and the spaces we inhabit. They offer fresh perspectives on identity, challenging us to navigate complex narratives that have been shaped for us – and those we might dare to reshape ourselves.
Magdalena Skotnicka: Home Ballet Positions
Through Home Ballet Positions, Polish dancer Magdalena Skotnicka reimagines her flat as a stage, where ballet and domesticity intersect in a poetic quest for self-discovery. Over three years, the artist methodically crafted a series of self-portraits, choreographing classical ballet poses in the intimate spaces of her home. This captivating project was self-published in collaboration with 19 Rzek Art Studio as a limited edition of just 20 copies.
For Skotnicka, dance is more than an artistic medium—it is a way of life, a tool for navigating internal and external complexities. “Bodily expressions helped me deal with self-acceptance,” she reflects. This sentiment is beautifully woven into each image, where her body, posed with precision, becomes one with the surrounding space. The concentration is palpable; her eyes are often closed as if in meditation, reflecting complete immersion in the moment.
There is an almost surreal quality to Skotnicka’s work as her body merges with the interior, at times so seamlessly that it becomes difficult to distinguish her form from the surrounding furniture. She dances through a labyrinth of drying racks, her limbs weaving effortlessly through the steel bars. She contorts herself into an upside-down L, resting on a coffee table, becoming an extension of the object itself. She curls into a compact ball, almost levitating beside the washing machine, her body so compressed that it could fit into the drum. In one striking image, she mimics the shape of a standing lamp, her figure a serene curve resting against its rigid form—a perfect union of the human and the artificial. The artist’s dedication to blending her physique with the objects creates a strange but captivating dichotomy: the poses may feel unnatural, yet they exude a sense of calm and harmony.
The scholar Bettina Lockemann notes in Thinking the Photobook: “The movement in the [page-turning] gesture connects the human body to the book.” Home Ballet Positions is not merely a documentation but a performance in itself, activated by the viewer through the act of leafing through its pages. The book becomes a choreography, with each turn of the page acting as a step in the dance.
The design of the publication mirrors the simplicity and elegance of its theme. It features minimalistic black-and-white shots, each image or sequence of images given its own page, surrounded by ample white space that presents the photographs as if on stage. Playful inserts add to the sense of movement, with tipped-in prints that seem to follow the dancer’s flow, either unfolding in a concertina style or nestling in the gutter of the book.
Home Ballet Positions is a lyrical ode to the quiet power of domestic space and the remarkable capabilities of the human body. Playing on the tension between comfort and discomfort, calmness and restlessness, the home transforms from a mere place of rest into a canvas for physical and mental expression, endlessly exploring the boundaries of movement.
Magdalena Skotnicka: Home Ballet Positions has been self-published with the support of 19 Rzek. Please contact the artist directly to purchase a copy.
Jaclyn Wright: High Visibility (Blaze Orange)
In High Visibility (Blaze Orange), artist Jaclyn Wright navigates the intersection of land use, settler colonialism, and late capitalism through a striking blend of photography, performance, and collage. Set in the American West, specifically Utah’s West Desert, the artist critically grapples with the lasting impact of human activity on that territory. Her work tells the story of the area by emphasising absence—whether it is the absence of people whose actions scarred the landscape or the ecological degradation caused by their presence. Wright’s performative acts, both by engaging with archival photographs and using her own body, guide the narrative.
The book is divided into several chapters, each exploring different aspects of the human-driven disruption in the region. Early sections focus on archival photographs documenting the land use that reshaped the area—agriculture, mining, military operations, and other practices of settler domination. Wright alters these images, challenging the viewer to reconsider photography’s role in commodifying and exploiting the natural terrain–its “complicity in forming and affirming mythologies of the US West”.
The later chapters follow the performer as she engages with desolate improvised gun ranges on Stansbury Island, the second-largest island in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This isolated location serves as a microcosm for the larger environmental and cultural decline present all over the region. Despite policies meant to preserve the area, it is continuously littered with debris: car doors, domestic appliances, and fire extinguishers riddled with bullets, casings scattered across the barren ground. These traces—the evidence of aggressive human interventions—become the focal point of her images.
Two of the artist’s video performances, captured in the monograph, further explore these issues. In Target Praxis, Wright presents bullet-riddled objects in a manner inspired by Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen. She continues this performative documentation in Collected Targets by displaying gathered targets against a fake desert backdrop, presenting them as forensic evidence of a culture that so easily blends destructiveness with recreation.
In High Visibility (Blaze Orange), the recurring blaze orange serves as a visual anchor. Often associated with hunting and shooting, this bright colour appears in everything from scribbles on archival images to the pieces of clay pigeons littering the desert. Its constant presence draws attention to the artificial divide between humans and nature—a colour designated to stand out against the landscape, much like the actions that disrupt it. While it symbolises violence and appropriation, it also represents resistance—most notably in Wright’s bold act of smudging the faces of colonial settlers in historical photographs. In doing so, she reduces their moments of pride and conquest to a faceless, anonymous crowd of perpetrators, simultaneously transforming them into potential targets.
R.H. Lossin’s accompanying essay contextualises Wright’s work within the broader discussion of American gun culture. This insightful text complements Wright’s visual narrative, deepening the understanding of how guns, the natural environment, and expansionism remain intertwined in shaping both the physical and cultural landscapes of the West.
Jaclyn Wright: High Visibility (Blaze Orange) has been published by GOST Books.
Carolyn Drake: Men Untitled
Turning back the male gaze is what Carolyn Drake confronts in Men Untitled. Recipient of the 2021 HCB Award by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the artist’s photo series is an intensely striking exploration of power, vulnerability, and the complexities of the masculine identity.
Drake’s subjects, mostly elderly men, appear nude or half-dressed, contorted into awkward, often unnatural poses—torsos twisted, bodies bent, interacting bizarrely with furniture. While some poses evoke male strength, most feel comical and absurd, suggesting a vulnerability that is often concealed behind a facade of toughness. The models are captured crawling on all fours, hanging by their ankles, or posing with shoes on their heads, embodying a sense of submission, play, and defiance all at once. The men, however, remain composed, exuding a quiet dignity and ease, finding comfort even in the most eccentric postures. The tension between these vulnerable positions and the juxtaposed images of objects associated with violence and power—a row of guns multiplied by mirror reflections, daggers embedded in the floor, or charred wood bristling with screws—creates a dramatic discrepancy, intensifying the bizarreness of the depicted world. There is a Lynchian quality to Drake’s images, where darkness, velvet, and grotesque human figures interplay within a palette of deep blues and shadows.
The book’s hidden mini-booklet, glued behind the softcover flap, offers a short epilogue by Drake, in which she recalls disturbing experiences with men. “It’s as though the act of looking at men is inherently dangerous,” she writes, after a brief account of her own youthful encounter with an abuser wielding a camera. Through this series, she confronts her past traumas, attempting to reclaim her gaze by using the very medium that was once turned against her. Drake’s approach to photographing male subjects echoes Susan Sontag’s observation: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”
One of the first images in the book is a self-portrait of Drake, her face obscured by a ball of volcanic clay, and wearing clothes that belonged to one of her models, Wallace, to whom the publication is dedicated. Wallace, who was promised the centrefold before his passing in 2022, is granted his wish as he appears in a fold-out spread in the middle of the book. Such appropriation of identity by Drake can serve as yet another means of confronting her troubled relationship with men; at the same time, it undoubtedly is a homage to her model, a gesture of appreciation, perhaps even affinity.
The title, Men Untitled, hints at anonymity, with a row of replicated, embossed messianic faces on the cover. Yet it is contradicted by the male models’ names listed proudly in the images’ title index on the back of the book. This duality possibly suggests that, despite her anger, Drake ultimately finds a form of catharsis, allowing both herself and her subjects to emerge from the experience with a renewed sense of understanding.
Carolyn Drake: Men Untitled has been published by TBW Books.
BOOK BLISS
Book Bliss is a quarterly gateway to the sublime world of art publications. Each article offers a curated selection of publishing gems, where the books’ aesthetics are as compelling as the narratives within. Whether you’re an art enthusiast, a photography addict, or a fan of beautifully designed printed matter, Book Bliss is your source of visual inspiration and literary delight.
