Nick Relph, Monsters
Publication
Mast Books / Pre-Echo Press, New York, 2022
Softback, 500 pp., 267 × 310 mm

MONSTERS serves as a tangential addendum to Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax (published by Pre–Echo in Autumn 2021). Using the same scanning process as before, Relph gathered 1000 images of payphone enclosures in New York and Los Angeles. In contrast to Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax the scans in MONSTERS are more uniform, upset though they are by digital artifacts and surface interruptions: paper, stickers, paint, rust, rainwater, a hologram, reflective vinyl, screws, ketchup, plants, bird shit, electrical cable.

For the book Relph and designer Joseph Gilmore assembled an edit of 452 images, with the sequence beginning on the front cover, and ending on the back. The page numbers are accompanied by another set of numbers which correspond to an individuated xerox copy of each image, which Relph is making available through his Seeing Plastic imprint.