Bruises, published by Loose Joints in May 2017, is the first book of photographs by the British artist and sculptor Samara Scott. Its 292 pages contain 290 colour plates drawn from the artist’s archive of 35mm half-frame images, unfolding over six years in which Scott used the camera as a form of ‘sampling’ the world, footnotes to feedback into her artistic practice.

The photographs range widely: Miami, Ibiza, Japan, Rome, Los Angeles, London, bedrooms, airports, shopping centres, family holidays and industrial estates. What connects them is Scott’s attraction to the corrupted surface — smears, dents, burps and leaks of the material world — and to a hybrid swirling of consumer objects and sensory experiences in flux. Everyday surfaces and depths appear suspended or perverted, saturated by the images, sounds and textures of contemporary capitalist society.

Scott has spoken of her own ‘sense of churning in the world’: a seasickness from the unmitigated acceleration of daily life, and the simultaneous horror and beauty of the material and digital world. The half-frame camera’s serendipity creates chance connections across place and time, and the book builds a looping, free-fall narrative of references that pairs candid observations with her recent installations at Eastside Projects, Pump House Gallery and The Sunday Painter.

The object itself is modest: 120 × 160 mm, a softcover with an embossed plastic dust jacket. Keeping the images close and numerous rather than monumental, Bruises shows how a sculptural intelligence translates into sequencing and how a photographic archive can function as an active part of a wider practice.