Volume
2004 - 2009
“The cards say: I see a past that is as strong as the future. Your project is so solid and its foundation so strong that it will be around for a long time, becoming iconic and a strong reference for others. All the time you have dedicated to it is definitely not wasted, it looks like you will be doing this for another 20 years at least.”
— Cristina De Middel, Fortune Teller + President, Magnum Photos
Volume is a long form documentary of bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. The books are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated — rather created by the librarian and found in the stacks— positioned by the last reader. The focus is on simple, provocative titles that, through color and scale, transcend the spines on which they appear to create playful, anthropological, conceptual artworks.
TIME, 2009
AMERICAN GIRL, 2008
FOREST AND STREAM, 2005
ENDEAVOUR, 2007
TODAY, 2007
TOMORROW, 2007
Mickey Smith’s photographs of bound periodicals, combine the technical finish and compositional elegance of portrait photography with the contingency of the snapshot. They are still lifes of objects captured in the wild. The photographs are striking and ingenious, and they’re also surprisingly compelling in other ways. These are pictures that seem to have something to tell us.
At first, her images read as visual puns, comical ready-mades, moments of Zen—a frayed binding marked TIME, a scarred cover stamped LIFE. Sometimes, the pictures are nearly aphoristic: they seem to speak for themselves. MONEY begets MONEY. The first ENDEAVOR is a failed ENDEAVOUR. TOMORROW forever disappears into TODAY.
– Excerpt from Visits to the Pyramids by Louis Menand, 2012
VOGUE, 2004
POWER, 2005
BLOOD, 2006
WORD STUDY, 2007
MONEY, 2005
COGNITION, 2008
SPECTATOR, 2004
SPINE, 2006
PROBE, 2006
METROPOLIS, 2008
THE LEISURE HOUR, 2007
LOCO, 2007