The Washington Post‘s Jessica Dawson wrote of New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris, “Two decades into his career, Harris still concerns himself with the game of appearances and perception: how we present ourselves in public, how our bodies—and the meanings they carry—are received by others, how gender and race are constructed… He also reveals a poetic sensibility: a desire, shared by writers and poets, to make visible our complicated inner worlds. He acknowledges the ambivalences we carry.” 

Blow Up, Harris’s first retrospective monograph, published on the occasion of his 2008 traveling exhibition, which originated at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, features full-color reproductions from throughout his career: “white face” self-portraits of the late 1980s, collage-based work of the mid-1990s, Polaroid self-portraits in various guises, large-scale Blow Up collages and Ghana-based photographs. Designed by award-winning design studio COMA, the volume includes several important new essays as well as a revealing conversation between Harris and artist Senam Okudzeto.