Luis Alberto Rodriguez came to photography after fifteen years as a dancer, and that training is legible in every plate of O., his second book with Loose Joints. Working in the studio, Rodriguez asks a cast of differing bodies, ages and backgrounds to relinquish choreography altogether: his nudes contort, collapse and recover poise, registering the moment when command gives way and something less guarded takes over. The book’s concerns — control, purity, the construction of identity — are framed through the writing of Simone Weil, whose pursuit of purity and meditation on suffering and transcendence shadow Rodriguez’s own questions about how much direction any of us truly holds.
The letter of the title carries the series’ range: a gasp, an exhale, a cycle, a zero, a reset. Rodriguez sets his figures alongside images of tasseography, the Dominican practice of reading coffee grounds, so that the studio encounter becomes a form of divination, an address to people who appear and disappear before the lens. The photographs draw on his Dominican heritage without turning it into decoration; it is the structure of the looking, not a motif.
Loose Joints published the book in May 2023 in a section-sewn, debossed cloth hardcover with ribbon, edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon. Eighty tritone plates are given a generous 27 by 32 centimetre page, a scale that lets the tonal delicacy of studio nudes and the darker, denser coffee-cup images sit in the same register. Across 156 pages the sequencing holds power and its loss in tension rather than resolving it.
For a collector, the interest lies in where O. sits within a coherent body of work: Rodriguez followed People of the Mud, his 2020 Loose Joints book on cultural heritage in Wexford, Ireland, with a study of the body that is more exposed and less documentary. The dancer’s understanding of weight, balance and fall gives the nudes a specificity that studio photography often loses, and the collaboration with Espenon and Loose Joints Studio makes the book an object as considered as the pictures inside it.
