By Charlotte Cotton. With Marina Chao and Pauline Vermare

Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves.

This collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. 

Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional delineations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression.

The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. They anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self- representation.

Includes interviews with Merry Alpern, Zach Blas, Natalie Bookchin, Nancy Burson, Kate Cooper, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ann Hirsch, John Houck, Trevor Paglen, Martine Syms, and Shelly Silver. 

With contributions by Lacy Austin, David A. Banks, Ben Burbridge, Dan Bustillo, common room, Mark Ghuneim, Johanna Hedva, Romke Hoogwaerts, Elizabeth Kilroy, Joseph Maida, Marisa Olson, David Reinfurt, Daniel Rubinstein, and Lucas Wrench

Designed by Geoff Han

Published by Aperture and the International Center of Photography
First edition, 2018

Softcover, 240 pages, 100 four-color and b&w images, 7 × 10 inches

ISBN: 978-1-59711-438-7