Volume

2004 - 2009

“One important thing about the images is their found-ness. The photographs are taken from life; they’re not made from props in a studio. The artist was on library safari.”

― Louis Menand, Writer + Pulitzer Prize Winner

Volume is a long form documentary of bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. The books are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated — rather created by the librarian and found in the stacks— positioned by the last reader. The focus is on simple, provocative titles that, through color and scale, transcend the spines on which they appear to create playful, anthropological, conceptual artworks.

Mickey Smith’s photographs of bound periodicals, combine the technical finish and compositional elegance of portrait photography with the contingency of the snapshot. They are still lifes of objects captured in the wild. The photographs are striking and ingenious, and they’re also surprisingly compelling in other ways. These are pictures that seem to have something to tell us.

At first, her images read as visual puns, comical ready-mades, moments of Zen—a frayed binding marked TIME, a scarred cover stamped LIFE. Sometimes, the pictures are nearly aphoristic: they seem to speak for themselves. MONEY begets MONEY. The first ENDEAVOR is a failed ENDEAVOUR. TOMORROW forever disappears into TODAY.

– Excerpt from Visits to the Pyramids by Louis Menand, 2012

Volume

Volume: 2010 - 2021