Articles of Faith

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

The mystery of objects—the fascination of their separateness and
integrity, and yet their curious power to hold intimate meaning for
us—is the subject of this carefully arranged and printed set of
photographic images. As a book, this is an art object, designed to be
held as well as read (it is a foot high but narrow, some four inches
across, like a timetable, and the paper is heavyweight glossy). It
contains a teasing, cryptic text, perhaps of relevant captioning,
perhaps not, to accompany the photographs. These are layered—for
instance, a daguerreotype portrait is placed on top of a 1950s
poster-figure that advertises Kodak—to establish a reflexive
self-consciousness: in other words, the pictures declare themselves as
pictures, as manipulated images possessing a multiplicity of meanings.
Puns, emblems, and allusions, both visual and verbal, ensure this
multiplicity. The game of this art presumably is to make us see the
process even as it operates; it takes us into the content, to form
meanings, while openly revealing how it does so. Some readers will find
this art repellent in its superiority of attitude, its knowingness;
others may experience its challenge to naive assumptions about what is a
picture, or what is a book, as bracing and stimulating; and some no
doubt will be amused by its playfulness. A number of the photographs, as
objects, fascinate on sight and continue to fascinate, while others seem
decidedly limited in interest—but perhaps another layer of meaning
remains to be discovered!