Clifton Meador’s recent work Soviet Onion engages photobooks as both historical sources and a medium of critical historiography. Published in 2021 under his Studio of Exhaustion imprint,1 Soviet Onion makes creative use of modest elements—paper, folds, and saddle stitching—to gather and to separate eight photo booklets, each of which takes a plunge into the daily life, monumental settings, and freighted occasions of Soviet states in the mid-twentieth century.
These booklets are presented in a gray cardstock box, the cover of which envelops its own contents. A laser-cut title allows glimpses of photographed text printed in black on red paper.2 This sight prompts an opening of the cover’s flap, which reveals a folio containing introductions to each of the booklets housed in a slipcase opposite. This peek behind the cover’s curtain gives us our first notion of the physical means a book has as its disposal to stage the...
University of California Press