Participation

A riotous photographic romp celebrating sociality and everyday clutterA glorious photobook in which people, places and things casually tangle up into beautifully baffling configurations, Jordan Weitzman's (born 1984) Participation captures the world at a slant where naked bodies form sultry architecture and everyday clutter assembles into art. With a Louis Fratino dust jacket featuring half-etched figures and mysterious symbols, the book's sequence is intimate and playful while never spelling itself out. Its title expresses the photographer's immersion in his milieu, as he locates with an exacting compositional eye where the goofiness and boredom of everyday life drift into formal complexity and undefinable emotional states; it is an invitation as much as it is a challenge, not only descriptive of Weitzman's willingness to get in and meet his subjects head, waist or side-on but for the viewer to crane their neck and pick apart his gorgeously twisted poetry of the strange ways people come together.