Busy Living takes its title from the pace its author keeps. Published by Loose Joints in 2019 to accompany Coco Capitán’s first major museum exhibition in Europe, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the book surveys six years of image-making by an artist still early in her career — and finds a range that resists easy summary. Playful staged pictures test the conventions of fashion and commercial photography; statuesque studies of Olympic swimmers sit alongside diaristic work made on trips through America and China. Capitán treats photography as one instrument among several, and the book gives real weight to her writing, painting and installation, from confessional passages to declarative texts edged with self-deprecating humour.
A commissioned essay by the curator Simon Baker accompanies the plates, and all texts appear in English and French. The sequence moves between colour and tritone printing across 172 pages, and the volume takes a considered physical form: a silkscreened softcover in Swiss binding, with stickers, at 210 × 297 mm. These are decisions that shape how the work is encountered rather than merely containing it — the Swiss binding in particular allowing the spreads to sit open and the juxtapositions to register.
What distinguishes the book is its refusal of a single register. Capitán moves between commercial commissions, personal memoir and gallery-scale installation without treating them as separate careers, and the result reads as a portrait of a sensibility under construction, absorbed in a fast-moving present. The writing is not decoration; it carries as much of the argument as the photographs do.
For collectors, the interest lies in several directions at once: an early survey of an artist whose practice has continued to develop, a document of a specific Paris exhibition, and a collaboration with a curator who has shaped the reading of contemporary photography. It is a book that rewards attention to its sequencing and its making, and it holds a clear place in any shelf concerned with the traffic between fashion, art and the printed page.
