Susan A. Barnett’s T: A Typology of T-Shirts begins with a simple, almost perverse decision: to photograph people from behind. The subject is not the face but the message printed across the back, and the book gathers more than two hundred such images made in cities and tourist spots across the United States and Europe from 2009 onward. Each picture pairs a body, a posture, and a piece of clothing with a line of text, and the accumulation of those pairings becomes the real subject.
What the photographs propose is that a T-shirt can work as a small public statement, and that reading many of them together is a way of reading a culture. The messages touch on hopes, ideals, political views, and personal mantras, and the book’s wit lies in letting them sit beside one another without commentary. By refusing the face, Barnett tests whether body type, dress, and demeanour can carry as much as an expression might. The effect is sociological as well as photographic, a record of what people want to be known for in the brief moment before they pass out of sight.
The book is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing as a hardback of 224 pages, measuring 24.5 by 16.6 centimeters, with 240 colour photographs. It includes texts by Marvin Heiferman, a leading art critic, and by Harold Koda, Head Curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Their contributions place the project in conversation with both photographic criticism and the study of dress. For a collector, the appeal is not merely the joke or the typology but the discipline of the whole: a project sustained over years, edited into a book whose format suits the repetition, and accompanied by writing that treats the subject seriously without overstating it.
