This book presents over portraits of 100 women taken by Canadian photographer Angela Grauerholz (born 1952) over a 30-year period. The title is borrowed from Max Ernst’s 1929 Surrealist collage-novel of the same name, creating a sense of womanhood both intricately individual and violently anonymous.
Over the course of her career, Angela Grauerholz has created a subjective vision of our world, full of intimate moments that reveal the passage of time. Her spaces are filled with people, glimpses of public and private interiors, and ethereal rural and urban landscapes. The out-of-focus quality of her photographs transforms them into a stream of consciousness, generating a sense of collective memory. She considers this approach “a representation of our experience: a continuous prodding into something that escapes us continuously.” Turning away from the single image shown on the wall, her photographs are displayed inside cabinets, in portfolios or on sliding panels. This method creates new viewing possibilities, opens up narrative potential, and pushes the concept of the archive to reveal its potentially endless thematic categories and points of entry. Grauerholz’s attention to how the medium is displayed and experienced makes the viewer an active participant in her photographic universe.