A beautiful big book
At about nine inches by nine inches it looks and feels like an old holy book, but it was published for the first time in 2010 — so it’s confusing. The detail and the craftsmanship is mind boggling but most of all, it is beautiful. There are 14 chapters with titles as grand as Honour and The Politics of Ornament, to the weird chapter entitled Assembling Two IKEA Bookshelves.
It is difficult to begin but before you know it, you can’t stop. You read not from the beginning, but from where something catches your eye. I began on page 146, Memory 1: Photography, a chapter on found photographs bought at a garage sale in Marian Bantjes’ hometown of Saskatoon in Canada. She works on these with paint or Photoshop, old photos of people she doesn’t know, and will never meet; photographs of two boys, Ronnie and Sheldy (their names are inscribed on the reverse).
