Curator: W. H. Chong
Photographs on book covers can dominate the text, but a greater expressiveness happens when photo and text find an equable balance, which then exerts a counter-influence: the title of the book becomes the title of the image. This component of a book cover meaning is now everywhere in the visual sphere – in contemporary art, on screens, in social media – the world has finally caught up to book dynamics.

This exhibition of books and photographs explores how the literary and the pictorial can exist in a fruitful tension, while sidestepping the questions of high versus low culture, of the distinctions between commercial and personal art.

BIOGRAPHY
W. H. Chong is an artist and book designer based in Melbourne. He is the design director at Text Publishing, and a founding member of the Australian Book Designers Association. Chong was inducted into the Australian Book Designers Hall of Fame in 2013, and writes a blog for Crikey called Culture Mulcher. His drawings of authors hang in the Wheeler Centre Green Room, and his near-life-size portrait of novelist Michelle de Kretser is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.