A Dozen Palm Trees

Photographs by Critter

A Dozen Palm Trees is one of three concurrent titles featuring Critter’s photographic series Seven Contact Prints – Myrtle Beach Motels. This series presents a compact and novel conflation of topics from Ed Ruscha’s photobooks: palm trees, parking lots, and swimming pools. In originals by Ruscha, and in tributes to Ruscha’s books, the subject is often announced on the cover, with deadpan depictions inside. A Dozen Palm Trees is a departure from custom. The title distracts from the collection’s primary typologies (contact prints as items, and motels as subjects), to emphasize the peripheral, titular subcomponents. The resulting read is more like search-and-find and connect-the-dots, ultimately leading the curious viewer from the immediate subject to the work that inspired it. A Dozen Palm Trees shares the spirit of Ruscha’s books, not by replicating their format, but by developing a new form of distribution¹: the web page as artist’s book.

Critter is a graphic designer, photographer, writer, editor, and the executive director of Inférieur. He is also the founder of Things Change Over Time, an independent publishing company based in North Carolina.