Ryan Waller is a partner at Other Means, a Brooklyn-based graphic design studio working with architects, artists, curators, editors, institutions, and schools.
Sebastian Stadler’s book work A Close Up of a Large Rock, I Think combines the artist’s photographic work L’apparition, 2015–2019 with text generated by image-recognition software. Each of the images, whether single or in a series, is a double exposure composition: a relatively generic scene or location is merged with a digital texture or surface. This combination sometimes punctures the image; on occasion it barely makes the viewer aware of the artifice of the reproduction. The photographs are combined with two forms of text: either a tentative description, like the book title, or what reads like an unmoored quotation. Both…