Joe

When renowned Hiroshi Sugimoto was invited to photograph the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, his attention immediately focused on an immense steel sculpture, Richard Serra’s Joe, one of the artist’s torqued spirals, which occupies a small courtyard of the museum. Joe allows viewers to walk in through a narrow passage between towering, sloping walls. The path leads to a surprising central space from which only the curving steel walls and the sky are visible. Combining extremely soft light and blurred darkness, Sugimoto’s pictures in this book capture the elliptical nature of Serra’s piece. His images are complemented by the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose affecting prose poem—about an "average Joe" experiencing the circular passage of time—echoes, without directly referencing, Serra’s sculpture. Designed by Takaaki Matsumoto, this beautiful, large-format book features tritone reproductions printed on luxurious uncoated stock. The result is an eloquent and visually arresting commentary on time, impermanence, and memory.