A collaboration with artist photographer Zoe Crosher, this book is the first in a series documenting the travels and encounters of Michelle DuBois. DuBois was an American woman who travelled as a call girl in the Pacific Rim during the 1970’s and 80’s.
The book’s first section, Autoportrait, establishes DuBois’ endless production of self-portrait through the consistent gesture of matching her eye level at the same height on the page, staging a woman always in control and setting the terms.
The second section is about DuBois’ companions without ever actually revealing them. The book acts as an editing device where men always appear in the gutter of the book or are cropped out of the pages by the bleed. The pagination area, echoing DuBois’ nomadic existence, fails to remain consistent throughout the book and the images themselves are set on an ever-drifting grid.
An interesting design challenge came when Crosher documented the process of organizing the archive. The book was first presented as an installation of pages on a wall, printed as a large photograph, and displayed as part of the Design Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. The book’s structure and content organization, therefore, can be read as a bound book as well as a series of spreads on a single plane. It is at once a book, an installation, and a photograph.
