The Crystal Coffin and Other Notes on Photography

The Crystal Coffin and Other Notes on Photography is a volume of both photography and writing by Patrick Reynolds, consisting of eighty photographs and accompanying essays. The photographic work presented within The Crystal Coffin includes a selection of landscape imagery and portraiture taken between 2011 and 2015 in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, suburban Massachusetts, Lisbon, and rural Portugal, while the texts accompanying the images explore a variety of subject matter, including alternative photographic histories, the evolution of photographic technology, the development of the photography book, the aesthetics of contemporary photography, and the inextricable link between the subjectivity of the photographer and the photograph. The visual and written work in the volume flows from impersonal to intimate, historical to anecdotal, technical to conceptual, and decisive to inconclusive. At its core, The Crystal Coffin is just as much an art project as it is an experimental academic exercise; the aim of the work is to demonstrate the myriad ways one can look at and read into the photographic image, as well as the benefits and shortcomings inherent in those disparate means of interpretation.