The Death of a Beautiful Subject by Sophy Rickett is an elaboration and extension of her earlier photo-work Objects in the Field. The book turns to her father's amateur archive of photographs of butterflies, reworking these images through colour, scale and sequencing into the artist's own visual signature. It might be understood as an act of restitution—a returning to the father—a realisation of the aesthetic potential within a familial and amateur photographic source, and a homage to one of the origins of the artist's own photographic practice. In both this work and the earlier Objects in the Field, made during her artist fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, there is a generational, gendered and genre transfer: a daughter taking up the visual material of a father, a woman re-printing the work of a male amateur, an art practice subverting the purpose of an originally documentary or naturalistic source. The result is a quiet meditation on inheritance, on the slippage between scientific record and aesthetic image, and on the strange afterlife of photographs once their original purpose has fallen away.