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)Compositions is 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. ‘Creating the posters not only allowed me to stay creatively engaged with my practice, but also created a kind of rogue gallery for those out walking in my local area,’ says Marlow, who initiated the project during the extended lockdowns of the COVID era. ‘With many of the posters lasting months and even years, I would regularly check in on their progress, and document them as they decomposed. I quickly discovered that – through the effects of the wind, rain, sun, graffiti artists, and even the hungry little snails attracted to my home-cooked glue mix – the posters deteriorated in such a way that these new gestures, artefacts, and aesthetics altered their reading.’
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