The first monograph focused on the work of Elle Pérez, collecting over a decade of deeply personal and visually striking images that imagine a world of love, desire, and vulnerability. Love, heartache, pleasure, pain—Elle Pérez has emerged as a defining voice of their generation, collecting over the past decade a trove of deeply personal and arresting images of vulnerability’s rawest materials. Pérez makes disarmingly intimate images that portray states of emotional intensity and physical transformation. They started out as a teenager photographing underground spaces, making a tender and vivid record of unalloyed freedom. Since then, their work has ranged from striking portraits of friends and lovers to gladiatorial photographs of wrestlers, crystalline landscapes and still lifes, and sprawling multimedia collages that pull together influences across art and literature. This book presents the artist’s most influential works from 2009 to the present—alongside the ephemera, notes, and research that inform their singular vision—and confirms Pérez’s mastery of the fine balance between document and imagination, perception and performance.
