Bill Burke’s *I Want To Take Picture* is a 2007 Twin Palms Publishers volume situated at the intersection of the artist’s book, pictorial history, and an engagement with Asia and boundaries. Its plainspoken, first-person title places emphasis on photography as a deliberate act. Rather than presenting a neutral survey of a region, the book announces the photographer’s position before places and histories shaped by division, passage, and encounter.
The volume comprises 64 pages, a concise extent that makes selection and sequence integral to its reading. Its classification as both a pictorial work and an artist’s book is significant: the photographs may be considered not simply as individual records, but as elements within an authored progression. Meaning therefore resides partly in the movement from page to page—in the relationships established among geography, historical consciousness, and the recurring idea of the boundary.
Twin Palms described its 2007 publication as a reprint of a book originally issued by Nexus Press. This history gives the later volume a clear place within Burke’s publishing record: it returns an existing photographic work to circulation through another independent art-book publisher, preserving the book as a constructed whole rather than extracting selected images from its original context.
For collectors, its interest lies less in unsupported claims of scarcity than in the conjunction of subject and form. *I Want To Take Picture* offers a concentrated example of how Burke’s photographs were organized to address Asia, history, and borders within the specific grammar of the artist’s book. The directness of the title, the disciplined length, and the work’s renewed publication together make this edition a useful point of entry into his approach to photography on the page.