## DREAM ABOUT NOTHING by Bobby Doherty

**Product Specifications:** hardcover / 120 pages / 240 x 305 mm

This is a collection of works by American photographer Bobby Doherty. Highly acclaimed for his still life photography, Doherty boldly juxtaposes individual images linked by wordplay, elevating his unique and meticulous visual language into a realm of unspoken, unconscious associations.

Doherty's photographs, individually, are very straightforward: alloy wheels, flowers, drink cans, zucchini... However, as a whole, their meaning becomes distorted. A photograph of an ice lolly takes on a different weight when placed next to a butterfly with tattered wings. So what are we looking at? Doherty's images overwhelm us with a question that probes what we consider mundane and what we consider special, leading to a larger question. It transcends the dimension of why is this more important than that and asks why is nothing important?

In this work, Doherty attempts a more introspective expression of his highly consistent visual practice. He encourages us to move away from the visually fragmented, image-saturated language that plagues much of contemporary still life and observational photography, instead carefully and precisely arranging observed objects and places before our eyes. What does it all mean?

Doherty takes this question seriously, more so than the bright colors and skillful composition might suggest. Drawing from images captured over five years in and out of the studio, he strips away the warmth of language seen in his previous work, Seabird, and juxtaposes them in a rhyming manner, collapsing the categories of the images.

These photographs challenge us to grasp the essence of photographic expression, leaving us feeling slightly uncomfortable. They tear at the seams of visual categories, demanding that we glean more from each photograph while simultaneously urging us not to. This work introduces a succession of images, magically crafted by Doherty, from the grand to the small, the broken to the pristine, leaving the reader breathlessly anticipating the next page.

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