Anxious Pleasures

Know about the book -

Anxious Pleasures is written by Amy Elkins and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1954877005 (ISBN 10) and 9781954877009 (ISBN 13).

In the spring of 2020, panic surrounding COVID-19 erupted and mandatory shelter in place orders went into effect, forcing the artist to abandon long-planned portrait shoots, travel, and work in progress in their art studio. They found themselves in a 340 sq ft apartment in a Bay-area neighborhood that was emptying by the day. The buzzing silence was profound. Two weeks into isolation, their drive to connect with others and make portraits only amplified. With no safe way to do so, they spontaneously turned the camera on themself to create a portrait. They printed it as a cyanotype, a simple nineteenth century photographic process that was only feasible due to the basic materials they happened to have on hand-a budget printer, transparency film and a package of fraying sheets of cotton pretreated with cyanotype chemicals. At first, they exposed the prints in the unpredictable spring sunlight coming through their third floor apartment window. As the seasons changed, they went on to make them in a garden, on the top of a car, or a patch of wobbly concrete tiles. They rinsed them in water and varying shades of blue emerged. They created a daily self-portrait using this technique for more than a year.