Sophy Rickett’s The Death of a Beautiful Subject was published by GOST Books in 2015 as a clothbound hardback of sixty-four pages, with a foil-debossed cover. The publisher’s description notes that the book brings together three strands: an “accidental archive” of butterfly photographs taken by Rickett’s retired father, extracts from an email dialogue between father and daughter, and a narrative text written by the artist. Rickett is credited as author and contributor; her father, who took the original photographs, is not named in the publisher’s record, and the book does not present a conventional single-author photographic credit.

That arrangement is central. The publisher describes the images as butterfly photographs, and the term “accidental archive” indicates they were not made as an art project but accumulated through amateur pursuit. By reworking this material and setting it alongside emails and her own writing, Rickett places the photographs within a family exchange and a first-person account.

The result is less a nature book than an inquiry into authorship, inheritance and the family gaze, and into what it means to treat someone else’s private obsession as public material. The title’s elegiac note is echoed in the work’s atmosphere: meticulous studies of insects arranged with a deliberateness that sits uneasily beside their origin in domestic leisure.

The book is notable for its hybrid structure—photograph, correspondence and narrative essay held in one sequence—and for its spare, considered production in a hardback of modest length. It invites attention to sequence, page pairing and the quiet friction between image and text.