In the spring of 2020, Aaron Stern and Lucy Helton began exchanging images by thermal fax machine, using the device to navigate pandemic isolation through virtual conversation. The fax was less a convenience than a constraint: it reduced photographs to coarse grain, introduced static and random glitches, and turned every image into a physical thermal print on paper.

What began as a two-person exchange widened over 2020 and into 2021, when Stern and Helton invited other artists to submit work to the fax machine. The book gathers 140 facsimiles drawn from the work of twenty contributors, among them Juan Brenner, Antony Cairns, Madeline Cass, Jerald Cooper, Jeremy Everett, Christian Filardo, Fryd Frydendahl, Matthew Genitempo, Anthony Hernandez, Kovi Konowiecki, Gabby Laurent, Pixy Liao, Susan Lipper, Mark Mattock, Christian Patterson, Aaron Schuman, Bryan Schutmaat and Nick Sethi. The result is not a survey of any single sensibility but a record of what happens when disparate images pass through one imperfect channel.

That channel is the book’s real subject. Because every source photograph was reduced by transmission and then recomposed as a thermal print, images that began in very different places end up speaking a common visual language of noise, degraded tones and interrupted legibility. The sequence lets those errors accumulate rather than treating them as defects to be corrected, so the reader registers both the distance between original and facsimile and the unexpected coherence of the whole.

Twin Palms Publishers issued the book in December 2021 as a sewn softcover with flaps: 192 pages, 9.5 by 12.5 inches, holding 140 four-color plates. The physical object is modest and workmanlike, which suits material that arrived by fax. For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in structure: a collaborative project in which an editorial impulse, a technology and a guest list are inseparable from the images, and in which the printed page is the final stage of a process that began as a transmission.