Book Description
Alvin Booth: Osmosis is a departure from Booth's earlier work. Uncomfortably constrained by conventional photography paper formats, Booth created his own paper, long and narrow, the ideal complement for his attenuated and fragile figures. The elongation of the original prints, the perfect accommodation for his filiform figures, is suggested here with 70 tritone photographs in the oversize format of the book. While Booth's fascination with the figurative remains, his "Osmosis" images are deliberately more abstract, diffuse, and otherworldly than his previous works. The human form is reduced to its bare lines, and like a delicate gouache the body dissolves into the paper. The exquisite tones of the images and the graceful, ghostly figures are suggestive of 19th-century photography, reflecting Booth's old-world techniques and approach to the craft. "Mysteriously laden with narrative potential, these works seem most successfully to speak to the sensibilities of a perhaps irretrievable past." -- ArtForum
