One Picture Book Two #9: “I” is Susan A. Zadeh’s contribution to Nazraeli Press’s ongoing series, and it belongs to the lineage of small, self-contained volumes that the publisher has used to give individual photographers a single, bounded project. The book comprises ten self-portraits made specially for this book, with the artist herself as the subject. The publisher describes the result as an intimate, vaguely surreal take on a timeless approach to image making. It is a hardcover of 16 pages with 17 four-color plates, limited to 500 numbered copies, and each copy includes a 5 x 7 inch original photograph signed by the artist.
Zadeh came to photography by an indirect route. Persian by ancestry and birth, she moved to France as a child and to the Netherlands as a teenager; she has lived in Amsterdam since. Trained as a classical dancer, she spent twelve years with the Dutch National Ballet before turning to photography and publishing. She became known as a champion of outsider artists through her magazine Eyemazing, which ran from 2002 to 2013 and received a Lucie Award. Her first monograph, Drowned in a Dream, was published by Nazraeli in Spring 2019. The series format asks for a concentrated statement rather than a survey, and the ten self-portraits were made with the book in mind.
Self-portraiture is among the oldest problems photography inherited from painting, and the interest of any new instance lies less in the genre than in the terms a photographer sets for herself. Here the terms are narrow: one subject, the artist, approached across ten plates and framed as intimate and only vaguely surreal. The distinction is that these images were made for the volume rather than drawn from an archive, which gives the sequence the character of a single sustained act rather than a retrospective gathering.
For a collector, the relevant facts are concrete. This is a defined entry in an established series by a photographer with a substantial prior body of work. The self-portraits were made for the volume, and the signed original photograph is integral to the publication as issued.
