Description

Photography is omnipresent; everyone is photographing everything. How do artists and writers reconcile this voracious urge to photograph with a photographic aesthetic and methodology that has tended to value "less is more"?

One pairs artists and writers to think about this question. Eight photographers--Marco Breuer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, Trevor Paglen, Alison Rossiter, Victoria Sambunaris, Rebecca Norris Webb and James Welling--were asked to submit one image on the theme of minimalism. Eight writers--David Campany, Teju Cole, Christie Davis, John D'Agata, Michael Fried, Darius Himes, Leah Ollman and Laura Steward--were enlisted to respond to those submissions, each paired with a specific image. The results offer a probing assessment of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's maxim: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."