Ed Templeton’s One Picture Book Two #22: Auto-Hypnosis approaches the automobile less as a subject than as a condition. Across photographs drawn from his personal archive, the car appears as cage, as antidote to boredom, as weapon, and as the window through which the world is watched at speed. Both black-and-white and color pictures are present, and the alternation matters: the color work can carry the sheen of fetishized objects and fashion props, while the black-and-white images tend to hold the plainer, harsher facts of living inside a machine. The window recurs as a framing device, a way of composing the world from inside a moving enclosure, extending the artist’s long attention to how cars shape looking itself.
Templeton’s larger project has documented youth subcultures, suburban convention, and the accidental encounter in a cinéma vérité register, and this subject sits naturally within it. Car culture here is not nostalgia or road-movie romance; it is socialization, constraint, and risk, from children strapped into car seats against their will to teenagers for whom driving becomes a promise of autonomy. The book’s small scale suits that intimacy. At sixteen pages with twenty-four plates, it reads as a sequence rather than a survey, and the hardcover format gives the photographs the weight of an object meant to be held, not scrolled.
As part of Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, the volume belongs to a publishing format in which a compact artist’s book is issued with an original signed photographic print. That pairing is the core of its appeal. For collectors, the book and the print together constitute the work as published: a considered sequence on one side, a physical photograph on the other, connected by Templeton’s signed authorship of both. The series has become a recognizable strand in contemporary photobook collecting, and this title extends it into one of the more ubiquitous and contradictory materials of American life.
What distinguishes Auto-Hypnosis is its refusal to resolve that contradiction. The car is treated as fetish and tool at once, and the photographs hold both without irony or apology. The result is a concentrated, unsentimental meditation on dependency and motion, made by an artist whose fluency in subcultural observation gives the subject an insider’s precision rather than a distant critique.
