In 2002 Twin Palms Publishers issued *Assemblies of Magic*, a hardcover collection of John O’Reilly’s photo transformations. The images are intensely personal montages in which meditations on space, art, war, death, and religion merge with the homoerotic. Rather than documenting the world, O’Reilly cuts and pastes it, physically joining iconic others into new compositions; the project presents this procedure as psychic incorporation, the deconstruction and reconstruction of the self carried out on paper. Through more than twenty-five years of part-time work as an art therapist, O’Reilly drew on his obsessions, fetishes, and fears as source material.

That method is the book’s real subject. Klaus Kertess and Francine Koslow Miller each contribute essays, giving the volume a critical frame. The title is not decorative: the publisher describes the resulting images as tiny assemblies of magic, an idiom of private ritual rather than public reportage. The 184-page volume reproduces 106 four-color plates at ten by twelve inches, a scale generous enough for the intricate cut-and-join work to be read closely.

The physical act of cutting and joining gives these images a particular relationship to photography. A photograph can preserve an appearance; a montage can bring separated appearances into a new connection. In O’Reilly’s work, that connection becomes a means of approaching personal experience through an assembled image. Looking closely can involve considering both the fragments and the composition they have become.

The book offers a way to follow the relationship between a visual method and an inner life. Its themes are broad, but their combinations remain personal. The photographs and essays invite readers to consider how an image can give form to an obsession or a fear, and how the act of making can also become an act of reflection.