Luis Jacob: Album III

Album III is the book version of Luis Jacob’s installation for 2007’s Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. The project consists of hundreds of images found and copied from various books, magazines and other publications, as well as the Internet. This exhaustive volume is 160 pages long and minimally designed, with only two to five images on a page— no text, no descriptions. The images speak for themselves. Coming from public sources, the pictures are grouped on each page formally, conceptually and intuitively, so that, for example, on a given page one might find a grainy black-and-white photograph of a pile of sausages in a butcher’s window next to a saturated color image of a boxer’s punching bag. The reader is invited to make his or her own associations and invent narratives through these visual puns. Sometimes humorous, sometimes bland and even sometimes devastating, this museum of found photography incorporates images that span from the early twentieth century to today.