Barbara Kruger | Picture/ Readings

Barbara Kruger

Picture/ Readings

N.P.: Self-published, 1978

[44] pp., 14.5 x 22.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

The artist’s first bookwork, now scarce and valued at $1500 US. 

“...we might consider Kruger’s “Picture/Readings,” a series that necessitates a sustained engagement with its sentences and stories that precedes and even precludes our desire to fold them into critique. Completed in 1978 and self-published, “Picture/Readings” combines images, largely of the exteriors of houses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Deerfield Beach, Florida, with texts of filmic, novelistic, and melodramatic ambitions. Rather than short bursts of words scattered among images, the stories in Picture/Readings are long by comparison to Kruger’s more famous work and unceremoniously formatted in blocks. If one wanted to write a dissertation on “Picture/Readings,” one could certainly argue for the importance of architecture in Kruger’s photo-collages, since they are themselves syntactic architectures made from blocks of text and image building upon each other. What is there to be said, however, about Kruger’s words here? They are not declarations, but rather stories or narrative scaffoldings that interweave and become the built environments of a life, a psyche, a series of loves and disappointments, of bodies that come together and disentangle. For us to allow Barbara Kruger to tell a story would change everything.”

- William J. Simmons, Flash Art