
The Color of a Flea's Eye: The Picture Collection
- Publisher
- Cahiers d'Art
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN
- 9782851173140
- Specifications
- Hardcover
460 pages
57 hand-tipped color plates
Numerous gatefolds and a variety of unique papers
Text by Joshua Chuang and Tim Griffin
Design by Joseph Logan and Taryn Simon
This tremendous feat of bookmaking deploys prints, postcards and other ephemera to explore the organization of visual information through a legendary library archive of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals, a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies since 1915. Each photograph is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, in artfully overlapped compositions where only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Years were spent sifting through letters, memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists, media, government and a broader public, including the removal and transfer of photographs to a separate collection once their marketplace value became apparent -- highlighting gender, immigration, race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography.