Beautiful Book Art by Cara Barer

Photographer Cara Barer has been working on a beautiful book art series since 2004. Phone books, software manuals, reference books, and other obsolete and discarded books find their way into her work. She soaks, dyes, folds, and otherwise alters the books in various ways for the final effect.

I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need “Windows 95?” After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house gave me a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper, and sometimes contents.

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