Still

John Brian King’s Still unfolds like a series of Flemish portraits and landscapes, but set in the shadowless world of a California office park. The photographer built a crude dark-green piece of furniture that doubles as an enormous display easel or a sort of table — different women lay or lean on it in a florescent-lit office, looking vacantly ahead. They take on a heightened, almost wax-sculpture quality as the photographer focuses on different aspects of them — one person’s purple hair and elf ears, another’s visible veins, draw the viewer in. The sense of placelessness of the portraits is accentuated by the wide, sun-filled desert landscapes that are interspersed throughout the book.

Still is unique, strange, and mesmerizing — a cold meditative series on beauty and horror.

21 cm x 14.8 cm softcover, 124 pages (120 color photos) — limited edition of 50 copies