Justine Kurland began SCUMB Manifesto by emptying her own shelves. Roughly 150 photobooks by straight white men — volumes that had accumulated as a working photographer’s library and, implicitly, as a working version of the medium’s canon — were cut apart and rebuilt as collages. The title adjusts Valerie Solanas’s 1967 tract: SCUM becomes SCUMB, the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books. The pun is exact about the material, because these pictures are made of other people’s pictures.

Kurland works as a collage artist here, and the credits should be read accordingly: the source photographs belong to the photographers whose books she took apart, and those photographers are not enumerated in this volume. The method has a history of its own. Collage is heterogeneous, disruptive, shape-shifting, cyborg-like — qualities that have made it a feminist strategy in art and in life. Kurland’s version is not only negative. She has described the ritual as restorative: a reclamation of history, a dismemberment of the patriarchy, an inversion of the usual terms of possession.

The figures gathered in these compositions continue a line of thinking from her earlier photographic projects, Girl Pictures (1997–2002) and Mama Babies (2004–07), even though the visual temperament is markedly different. Four essayists — Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord and Ariana Reines — write alongside the plates, giving the sequence several independent frames of reference rather than one authorial voice.

MACK’s edition carries the argument into its construction: a Swiss-bound paperback of 282 pages and 116 plates, silkscreen-printed gauze on the spine, eighteen gatefolds printed across two paper stocks, and a 48 × 60 cm poster inserted into the back cover. The book was shortlisted for the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.

For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in consequence. A photobook that destroys photobooks in order to ask who was allowed to make them is a self-questioning object, and this one states its case typographically, physically and argumentatively at once.