Clare Strand’s Skirts takes as its subject a domestic object made strange: the table, dressed in a pleated cloth so that it reads as a body in a skirt. Each monochrome portrait in the book shows one such clothed table standing before a draped curtain. Nothing else enters the frame. There are no people, no rooms, no explanations. The photographs are plain in their means and precise in their staging.

The book turns on this double removal. Strand is working with the conventions of studio portraiture — the sitter, the backdrop, the careful arrangement of surfaces — while withholding the sitter. What remains is cloth, furniture, and light. A table is not a woman, and a curtain is not an interior, yet the pictures keep proposing these substitutions and declining to resolve them. The title’s wit is not incidental; it is the mechanism by which the work unsettles the viewer’s habit of reading appearance as identity.

GOST Books published Skirts in 2013 as a 24-page hardback, with the cover produced in foil deboss. Philippe Starck contributes an introduction, a pairing that places Strand’s restrained images in conversation with a designer’s eye for objects and their social lives. The book reproduces the work in its original exhibition size.

For collectors, the interest lies in the combination of a sharply defined conceptual premise, a restrained physical edition, and a collaboration that frames the work without over-explaining it. It is a book to return to for the way it holds an unresolved idea steady on the page.