Mitchell Moreno’s “Body Copy” began with a thousand lines of found text, gathered from apps and websites where men, mostly, were seeking other men, mostly, for sex or dates. From that corpus Moreno selected forty-three adverts and answered each one with a self-portrait. The self-portraits were made alone in their London flat, using a tripod and cable release, with costumes and props drawn from charity shops and recycling sites. Moreno, whose day job is as a builder and decorator, acted as set maker, stylist, model, and photographer. The working methods are inseparable from the meanings. In the photographed image, desire circulates as a kind of material to be fabricated, and Moreno’s body, trained by labour, becomes a site where the desires of strangers are performed rather than simply represented.

The one thousand lines of text are ordered alphabetically through the book, reading as an experimental poem, so the architecture of the volume holds the language of desire apart from the images while keeping it present as a countervailing rhythm. That arrangement is a formal device, and it is also an argument: that the vocabulary of online desire is collective, repetitive, and available to be restructured. The series, made over four years, offers something like an ethnography of the archetypes, kinks, prejudices, and preoccupations of non-straight masculine desire at a particular moment and in a particular place. Moreno has said the project began during recovery from body dysmorphic disorder, as a way of addressing a crisis of self-seeing and of being seen; the work moves past the therapeutic without abandoning it.

This is a book with current and lasting pertinence. Its subject is how queer masculinities are performed and stabilized through digital platforms and the economies that run them, and the photographs attach that subject to the conditions of their own making: a domestic set, a modest budget, a body that builds as well as poses. The photographs have been exhibited at Encontros da Imagem, Copenhagen Photo Festival, Singapore International Photo Festival, Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Head On, Photofusion, Preus National Museum of Photography, Bibliothèque Levi Strauss, and Circulation(s). For collectors interested in contemporary photography that treats identity, labour, and digital culture as interlocking, “Body Copy” is a substantial and carefully organised body of work, and an unusually articulate example of an artist’s book in which text, sequence, and production method operate as one system.