In 1992 Twin Palms Publishers issued *Stills*, a 104-page hardcover volume in which the filmmaker James Herbert turns frames of his own moving images into photographic plates. Herbert, long based in Athens, Georgia, began photographing single frames from his films specifically to make photographic prints. The book collects 54 gravure plates, drawn from Herbert’s films. It is neither a production archive nor a conventional monograph: a single frame, severed from the motion that gave it meaning, must carry the weight of a photograph.

The plates keep what the publisher calls the erotic and dreamlike qualities of their source films while standing on their own as individual glimpses into the artist’s imagination. That double life is the book’s proposition. A chosen frame is no longer a passage of time but a composed rectangle of bodies, light, and gesture; the erotic charge and the oneiric atmosphere survive the transfer from screen to page.

Gravure reproduction gives the selected frames a material form on the page. This matters to the project because the image is being encountered apart from the film’s movement and duration. A reader can pause, return to a plate, or compare one image with another. These possibilities make viewing the book a different activity from watching a film, even when the image began in the same work.

The book was produced as a hardcover of roughly 9 by 12 inches with 104 pages, and contains 54 gravure plates. *Stills* is a compact statement by a filmmaker who moved into another medium without abandoning his own. It rewards slow attention: the plates ask to be read one at a time, as photographs, even as they quietly remember the films that produced them.