JTF (just the facts): Published in 2025 by Meteoro Editions (here). Softcover with exposed thread binding (22 x 29 cm), 176 pages. Includes poems by Sumia Juxun. Design by Brian Paul Lamotte. In an edition of 700 copies. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Many of the photobooks we review here at Collector Daily have been designed in a way that features individual photographs on white pages. We might think of them as putting the photographs first, by creating the space, pacing, and sequencing in the surrounding pages necessary to appreciate the pictures individually. There is an understated conservatism (and confidence) implied by this kind of pared down design approach, as it strips away context and artistic explanation, largely leaving the artworks to stand on their own and speak for themselves.
Much less often, artists and their photobook design partners opt for approaches that deliberately step away from this isolated single image structure, choosing instead to use the body of work to be documented as malleable raw material for an expressive meditation on the central themes and visual motifs that the works embody. This is a much riskier path as it diverges both from conventional thinking and from straightforward reproduction, but when it succeeds, as it does in Alanna Fields’s Unveiling, the result is something far more enveloping, engrossing, and experiential than a linear parade of pictures can ever be.
Unveiling is Fields’s first photobook monograph, and offers a survey of four separate photographic projects (“As We Were”, “Audacity”, “Constellations”, and “Mirages of Dreams Past”) made over the past six years. But rather than a step-wise review of these separate efforts, Unveiling selects several works from each project and digs into them more deeply. In a few cases, a full bleed edge to edge view of an artwork is shown, but more often, the work is cropped down to a tighter view of just a portion of the composition, zeroing in on specific areas and details. As the pages turn, we move up and down, in and out, from faces to bodies and back again, and from overpainted to unmediated areas, creating a swirling, repeating flow that wrestles with different aspects of visibility.
Archival imagery stands at the center of Fields’s artistic practice (at least in these first projects), particularly pictures of 20th century black queer life. Her work starts with a process of ancestral excavation and photographic rediscovery, of pulling previously overlooked images out of the past and rewriting (and re-imagining) a more nuanced visual history of the bodies, identities, joys, and freedoms of being black and queer seen there. Fields has said that having not seen enough of this kind of representation when she was a young person, her work seeks to rebalance those scales artistically, offering the comforts of that missing past (and those proud lives) to those who never found them.
As the photobook’s title implies, much of the way Fields engages with her archival imagery is through veiling and unveiling in different ways. Given the ways that black queer people have felt the need to be hidden, to conform, or to conceal themselves to avoid prejudice, Fields’s approach plays with those seen/unseen dualities, making them more apparent via her various interventions. As seen in the works included in the book, she’s developed a broad tool box of interpretive techniques, including tinting, collage/montage, overpainting (often with textural paint thickened by encaustic wax), image repetition/nesting, surface interruption (with bands of paint and encrusted crystals), clustering of repeated/fragmented images, and sculptural layering, each of which modifies, enhances, or re-interprets the underlying original photographs.
The innovative cover design of Unveiling alludes to these many techniques. Starting with Fields’s 2021 work “Canyons Beyond Time”, which features four repetitions of a man’s head veiled by geometric blocks of golden paint, the folded cardstock cover uses its own geometries to further fragment the work, splitting it across front and back in two cropped rectangles. From there, the title and artist’s name are printed in clear ink, only really visible in raking light but adding a subtle halftone texture, the raised tactile dots soft to the touch; the title and publisher’s name are further printed in yellow ink on the fore edge of the book. Inside, the endpapers replicate the honeyed tones of wood grain, like a 1970s era paneled basement or the vertical strips of Fields’ painted interventions.
The active remixing continues on the book’s main pages. All of the spreads are full bleed imagery, most of which are cropped fragments of larger works. In many cases, the gutter is used smartly, as an intentional dividing line or as a geometric orientation point for other squares, rectangles, and divisions. Thin veils and scrims over images of couples and pairs give way to bolder blocks of painted color that interrupt and isolate faces and bodies, with quiet companionship and comfort slowly transformed into more overt expressions of glamour and seduction. Eyes, hands, bare skin, and subtle gestures send various signals, which Fields then reactivates with her interruptions, repetitions, and veils. Several works feature telescoping repetitions or stuttering side-by-side frames like a film strip, amplifying the weight of a particular stare, a smile, or an available body. And the last few pages of Unveiled repeatedly reinterpret the same image of two women, isolating different fragments of the picture and using a thin wash of purple paint to alter the mood.
What’s compelling about Unveiled is the way it fronts Fields’s artistic ideas. The design approach heightens our appreciation for the push and pull of visibility and invisibility in her works, and of black queer culture more broadly, and encourages us to think harder about the malleability of memory and the ways an artist can thoughtfully amplify existing archival imagery. Unveiling is an elegant photobook object, one that both pulls us deeper into Fields’s interventions and multiplies the elusive personal joys she has so smartly uncovered and re-presented.
Collector’s POV: Although her work has appeared in various group shows and art fairs in the past few years, Alanna Fields does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. Those collectors interested in following up should likely do so via her website (linked in the sidebar).
