
Only the plants will ever know
- Publisher
- Outer Space Press
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 978-3-942547-70-3
- Specifications
- Clothbound hardcover with foil and tipped-in print, smyth sewn with grey thread
20 x 28 cm
72 pages
Offset and Risograph, artists' own technique
120 gsm uncoated paper
Edition of 200 copies
A photobook that may leave your fingers and conscience a little dirty. It combines two stories that run parallel and form a visual dialogue: photographs from "The Great Plant Dictionary" (1972), selected around the story of Amorphophallus titanum, the rare "corpse flower" that blooms only once in a decade, for a day or two, and gives off a signature stench; and a cardboard box found in 2020 holding black-and-white slides of rephotographed pages from a porn magazine stamped 20 July 1970. Looking through these amateur photographs is an intimate experience of seeing the magazine through someone else's eyes, and the artists reclaim that view, cropping, reframing and reorganising the images before reprinting them with their own distortion of offset and Risograph sheets, which recreates the soft, metallic, graphite look of the original slides. In 2016, dozens of corpse flowers kept miles apart began to bloom together; only the plants will ever know why.