Aikaterine Gegisian - Handbook of the Spontaneous Other

In Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, Aikaterini Gegisian brings together a diverse range of photographs found and produced in Western Europe and the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Comprised of a series of 59 collages, the book playfully recontextualizes images from popular culture that Gegisian sourced—from pornographic magazines, travel catalogs, and National Geographic—in order to subvert the ways in which the body, nature, and pleasure have been represented in Western capitalist fantasies.

Divided into nine chapters that follow a metaphysical narrative of color and sensation, the book ultimately seeks to locate a “spontaneous other”; a notion of self and pleasure that exists beyond the confines of popular culture and its dominant modes of representation; color photographs.