Michael Snow
1975
Book cover for Michael Snow "Cover to Cover" (Halifax & New York: Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and New York University Press, 1975)

Book cover
Swann Galleries - New York
Courtesy of Swann Galleries (Auction, May 15, 2008, #2146, Lot 185)
 
Photography by Keith Lock. A sequence with 312 full-bleed photographic reproductions. 4to, photo-pictorial wrappers, small crease on front cover; with an embossed hand stamp, a few leaves crimped at far edge. first edition, signed by Snow.
 
Michael Snow, a conceptual artist and film-maker, produced "Cover to Cover" as an artist''s book. It contains no text except the colophon and can be read forwards and backwards, with both sections converging towards the center.
 
Both the front and back covers are illustrated with a detailed photograph of a wood-paneled door, and as the reader progresses through the pages, which unfold as a quasi-cinematic non-linear narrative, a succession of full-bleed images leads into and through spaces and surfaces that continuously shift between illusory physical and representational existence. A tour-de-force by a contemporary of Robert Cumming and John Baldessari.
 
LL/28646