Affinities: A Journey Through Images from The Public Domain Review

(Hardback)

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Description

An exploration of echoes and resonances across two millennia of visual culture, celebrating ten years of The Public Domain Review.

Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads - hatching eggs twin with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep-sea coral.

At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images - opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.

Praise for The Public Domain Review
'An Aladdin's cave of curiosity ... the best thing on the web' Guardian
'A gold mine of fantastic images and stories' The New York Times

Reviews

'Builds bridges between visuals plucked from the last 2,000 years, in doing so prompting readers to rethink the meaning of originality by leaning into visual or thematic parallels' - Creative Review
'Delightfully imaginative ... This is a book designed for random perusal' - BookPage

Author Bio

Adam Green is co-founder and editor of The Public Domain Review, an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to exploring curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. Since launching the project in 2011, he's taken the review from modest beginnings to one of the most renowned digital projects of its kind, lauded by such outlets as the Guardian, The New York Times and Vice. He is also working on other experimental art and literary projects that build on his editorial work plumbing the depths of historical archives.