Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series
proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two
decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing
groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical
narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one
cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art /Just
Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit
and bookish smarts.
“The Sorted Books project began in 1993, and it has has taken place on many different sites over the years,
ranging form private homes to specialized book collections. The process is the same in every case: I sort
through a collection of books, pull particular titles, and eventually group the books into clusters so that the
titles can be read in sequence. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as
the actual stacks themselves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Taken as a whole,
the clusters are a cross-section of that library's holdings that reflect that particular library's focus,
idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies. They sometimes also function as a portrait of the particular book owner.
The Sorted Books project is an ongoing project which I add to almost each year, and there there are
hundreds of images in the ongoing archive to date.”
- Nina Katchadourian