Comprising a series of iconic street photographs recast as guerilla street posters – and later rephotographed as they decayed on walls around the city – Jesse Marlow’s(De)Compositionsis a striking new gesture towards photography’s myriad afterlives. In a contemporary context in which images proliferate endlessly online, Marlow’s latest book feels like an informal ode to the photograph’s physical potentials and limitations –the internationally-renowned Melbourne-based photographer’s images exploring the variable, democratic, and happily fallible qualities of the physical print in the public sphere.

The book itself – Marlow’s first with Perimeter Editions – is presented in the form of a stack of wall-to-wall, full-bleed sheets, scored once down the middle, and unbound save for a cloth-wrapped elastic band. We experience these images as fragments, repetitions, textures, and tears. Their gritty fine-grain details, striking colour palette, and dynamic compositions are brought into vibrant conversation with one another across recto and verso pages, half of one image colliding and melding with half of another. It is only when we unbind the book block that we can witness each photograph in its entirety.

Purchase De(Compositions) through the Perimeter website here.