Laurence Miller Gallery Photograph of the Week #245

Victor Schrager is a master of modern still life photography, and in this series he turns his focus to books. Like Morandi's iconic still lifes of jars and vases, Schrager reduces the books to their essential forms and uses them as visual building blocks, creating a sculptural sense of space and color. The name of the Series ("Composition as Explanation") is borrowed from Gertrude Stein, but the images themselves are scrubbed of specificity—the spines and covers are unmarked—and the books read as Platonic ideals. For all their formal pleasures these works aren't pure abstraction, they also speak to the sensuousness of the books as objects, and the tactile experience they offer to the reader. 

This series has gained newfound resonance as politicians and legislatures around the country take aim at books in libraries and educational settings, through bans and censorship. The enduring beauty of Victor Schrager's books stand in defiance to those who seek to suppress the printed word.