Girl Plays with Snake, published by MACK in 2016, gathers images drawn from Clare Strand’s extensive personal archive. Its recurring subject is precise and unsettling: women and girls holding snakes, playing with them, or looking at them with apparent affection. Across these encounters, the snake becomes less a fixed symbol than a device through which cultural fantasies, private fears, erotic suggestion, and the theatre of popular imagery can be held in uneasy suspension.

The book extends Strand’s long engagement with scrapbooks, magazines, and photographs collected since her mid-teens. Rather than treating archival material as transparent evidence, she subjects it to selection, recontextualisation, and manipulation. The original texts attached to the backs of the images are retained as an essential part of the work, introducing stories that move between the bizarre and the erotic, as well as the registers of “Myth” and “Credo.” Image and text therefore do not simply explain one another; they create a deliberately unstable field in which meaning is assembled, questioned, and sometimes made faintly absurd.

Strand’s method combines intensive research with deadpan humour and a close reading of popular culture. Her practice has often involved trickery, reconstruction, and a sustained interest in the medium’s origins, and Girl Plays with Snake exemplifies that approach in concentrated form. The book’s strength lies in its refusal to settle the material into a single interpretation: fascination and repulsion, intimacy and performance, innocence and danger remain visibly entangled.

For collectors, this is a compact and distinctive statement within Strand’s continuing archival practice. The 128-page hardcover, issued by MACK, presents a self-contained investigation into how images acquire meaning through circulation, captioning, and arrangement. Its subject may be strange, but the underlying question is serious: what do popular pictures reveal about the desires and obsessions that society teaches us to recognise—and to repeat?