Joe

A leading photographer, bestselling author and prize-winning designer lend their visions and voices to this unique collaboration.When renowned photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the Pulitzer Museum, his purpose was to take pictures of the architecturally significant building. His attention was diverted to a large metal sculpture in the courtyard: Richard Serra's Joe. A torqued spiral, 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 spiral and the sky are visible. Combining extremely soft light and blurred darkness, Sugimoto's pictures in this book capture the undulating, 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.Hiroshi Sugimoto's exhibitions have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, LAMoCa, and MCA Chicago. The Hirshhorn Museum and the Mori Art Museum were joint organizers of a 2005 Sugimoto retrospective.Jonathan Safran Foer is the bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Takaaki Matsumoto is an internationally acclaimed designer whose book designs have showcased the work of artists and designers from Roy Lichtenstein toGiorgio Armani. For the past decade he has been the exclusive designer of books featuring the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto.