Nazraeli Press issues Stu Levy’s contribution to its One Picture Book series as a compact hardcover of sixteen pages, and the format is deceptively spare: one duotone plate and one original photograph. The subject is Jerry N. Uelsmann, and the central image is a fold-out grid portrait. Levy builds such portraits by combining multiple photographs of the same sitter, taken from various perspectives and distances, into a single composite. The face is not fixed in one exposure but assembled from many, and a signed original print is mounted to the sheet.
That method is the book’s real argument. By multiplying viewpoints rather than chasing a decisive instant, Levy treats portraiture as accumulation, letting a likeness emerge through repetition and small shifts of position. The approach belongs to a sustained body of work: the 2010 Nazraeli monograph Grid Portraits, in which these composites are the subject, and an earlier One Picture Book in which Levy also made a grid portrait of Uelsmann. This volume sits within that continuity rather than standing apart as a curiosity, and its fold-out presentation lets the grid be encountered as a structure rather than a single flat image.
Uelsmann gives the project a particular charge. A central figure in American photography, he is identified in the catalogue record with portraiture, artistic photography and artists’ books, and his presence as subject sharpens the book’s inquiry into how a photographer is pictured by another photographer. The pairing is not incidental: Levy’s composite method asks what a portrait can hold when one frame is not enough, and Uelsmann, whose own work is bound up with constructed images, makes that question concrete.
The collector’s interest lies in this convergence of method, subject and book form. The signed original print mounted to the sheet ties the edition to the photograph as a collected object, while the duotone plate and fold-out grid make the book’s structure part of its meaning. Sixteen pages keep the encounter close and deliberate, closer to a study than a survey. For a collection attentive to photobook design, to serial publishing, or to the ways photographers portray one another, this title earns its place through the clarity of its conceit and the care of its making.
