In what could be understood as a book-form analogue for his large-scale anarchitectural practice, Gordon Matta-Clark created this work from black-and-white photographs of exposed wallpaper and wall paint in half-demolished Bronx tenements. The photos have been recolored with yellow, green, blue, red, purple, and orange inks, and printed on thin pages split down the middle (much like the walls in Matta-Clark’s best-known projects), such that the top and bottom halves of each individual photograph can be mixed and matched. Indeed, is difficult to keep the contiguous halves of the photographs together, and one is encouraged to experiment with combinations. The result is a kind of “sample book” of the ruined walls and their subtle, amorphous color fields.

The cover provides a wider view of the source photographs: four images from a contact sheet, “cut” in the camera, revealing the serial sectioning of the housing blocks.