an end and a beginning

an end and a beginning

Artist: Alyssa Minahan

Publisher: Datz Press

USD 120

– Book Size: 20.5 × 26.8 cm
– Pages: 66 pages
– Binding: Softcover / PUR Perfect binding with French folding
 / Transparent slipcase
– Publication Year: 2022
– Limited Edition: 100
– ISBN: 978-89-97605-77-4

“By creating images that will ultimately disappear or deteriorate into something else, I seek to challenge established notions of process, permanence and completion. What does it mean to make a photograph that is purposefully evasive?”

——Alyssa Minahan

Alyssa Minahan’s photographic objects included in this book – chemigrams, x-rays, gelatin silver prints, photograms, lumens and polaroids – oscillate between light and darkness, representational and abstract, and ephemeral and permanent. Links between disparate photographs are evidenced by stains and traces of chemistry, repeated imagery, and formal elements such as color and shape.

Minahan contemplates the questions: ‘How can the photographic medium describe loss?’ and ‘Can the process by which the work is created become the work itself?’ In response, her book presents a lyrical rendering of photography’s singular ability to visually depict essential truths about our lived experiences, evidenced by the creation of unique, non-reproducible objects imbued with marks and confirmation of their own existence.

About Alyssa Minahan

Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials – such as unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives – in unconventional ways to explore photography’s complex relationship with time, space, and memory. Alyssa recently released NOTES (2019) and an end and a beginning (2022), a handmade photo book published by Datz Press.

Alyssa has exhibited her work in several galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Gwangju, South Korea), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), the Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), the Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, WA) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, MA).

About Datz Press

Datz Press is an art book press that works with photographers, designers, and bookmakers to create, publish, and exhibit books centered on photography. They advocate for the growth of participatory artistic activity through exhibiting and publishing art, as well as art education.

More information: datzpress.com