ET IN ARCADIA EGO – SAMESHIMA
The original edition was produced in 2015 for Open Book, an exhibition curated by Shelly Jacobson at RM Gallery. Only eight copies were made.
Ten years later, long out of print, the book still feels current given recent geopolitical and climate events. The images haven’t been revised. If anything, the world around them has shifted—or come into sharper focus. What once seemed distant now reads more directly. The same conditions persist: conflict, spectacle, excess. All still there, just harder to look past.
The photographs were made over two decades (1992–2013), largely during overseas travel. They move through art museums, tourist sites, and shopping destinations—spaces of display and controlled encounter. Ruins, paintings of war, natural history museum dioramas, the Paris catacombs and scenes of retail excess sit alongside staged grandeur of Caesars Palace. A couple of images made in Aotearoa New Zealand and a selection of public-domain artworks are folded into the sequence.
The title, Et In Arcadia Ego, points to the classical reminder that death is present even in paradise. There is no single subject, only an accumulation: images of images, histories already framed, realities already mediated.
Original publication date 2015, reissued May 2025
Softcover | singer sewn | 44 pages
Second printing 100 copies
RRP $50
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