Recorder gathers three bodies of work that Miranda Lichtenstein made by refusing to let an image rest. All of them descend from Welcome Water, a floor-bound sculpture she built with J. Stoner Blackwell from flatbed scans of fragile constructions derived from disposable carrier bags, cut out and stitched together. Rather than document that object, Lichtenstein kept its residue in circulation, reworking negative cutouts and test prints into photographs of their own. Waste becomes raw material; the record becomes the subject.
The book’s three sequences are distinct but difficult to separate. In Holes, black-and-white images rework Blackwell’s laser-cut interventions in the bags. Grounds pins and affixes leftover cutout shapes into physical layers that leave a void at the centre of the frame. Untitled pushes furthest into abstraction, printing and rescanning source material as many as thirty times, so that ink, program errors and exaggerations accumulate until the original subject dissolves into free-form visual incident.
The result sits at an unusual angle to photographic convention. Lichtenstein works with photography’s tendency both to register and to obscure, letting mechanical repetition and the entropy of print technology shape pictorial space. What emerges is less a set of pictures than a feedback system, and its pleasures are cool rather than immediate: dense, unresolved fields that reward returning.
Loose Joints published the book in March 2021 as an embossed softcover with a double-folded cover, 104 pages and 60 colour plates at 222 × 285 mm. Two writers, A. L. Steiner and Prudence Pfeiffer, contribute texts. Collectors drawn to process-based abstraction, artist’s books that treat their own production as content, and Lichtenstein’s sustained inquiry into the environmental weight of single-use plastic will find the volume a considered statement of that thinking.
This is an object made by a publisher attentive to how a book performs an idea — the double-folded cover and embossed finish extend the logic of layering and concealment within. It belongs in a library where photography’s conceptual edges matter, alongside other Loose Joints titles exploring the printed page as a site of experiment rather than mere reproduction.
