How Things Look

Max Creasy’s new photographic work How Things Look, plays with the gap between how things look and how things are. How Things Look is, on the one hand, a statement about the appearance of things, the thing as object, as something to be observed. On the other hand, it suggests an unsettling possibility: how might things, inanimate objects, begin to look — for example back at us? This collection of photographs could be considered a series of portraits, even if unconventional.

The publication sequencing articulates unique associations within this collection of images and explores the simplicity of the connections between their appearance and the objects themselves. The utilisation of normative tools and materiality is conveyed throughout the publication but there is an abstraction at play; double covers give way to a rotated format where facing images find themselves slipping onto the ‘verso’ of each spread. Alongside an essay by Yuma Shinohara explores this precariousness at play in the work, in both Japanese and English.