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Affinities
Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads – hatching eggs twin with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep-sea coral.
At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Exquisitely cloth-bound and extending across more than 360 pages, its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.
A compelling object and experience in its own right, Affinities also acts as a launchpad for further discoveries and inventive engagements with the commons. Channelling the bold curatorial spirit of The Public Domain Review, the book’s meticulous sourcing points to works, creators, and collections around the world, serving as a gateway for future forays into the digital public domain.
Launched to coincide with the tenth anniversary of The Public Domain Review, the book promises to give followers of the hugely popular site more of the wonderful encounters that they have come to expect, and to introduce a new audience to its singular creative vision. Volume is delighted to move this digital cabinet of curiosities onto the printed page.
At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Exquisitely cloth-bound and extending across more than 360 pages, its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.
A compelling object and experience in its own right, Affinities also acts as a launchpad for further discoveries and inventive engagements with the commons. Channelling the bold curatorial spirit of The Public Domain Review, the book’s meticulous sourcing points to works, creators, and collections around the world, serving as a gateway for future forays into the digital public domain.
Launched to coincide with the tenth anniversary of The Public Domain Review, the book promises to give followers of the hugely popular site more of the wonderful encounters that they have come to expect, and to introduce a new audience to its singular creative vision. Volume is delighted to move this digital cabinet of curiosities onto the printed page.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2022
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252 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 27, 2022
I'd love to tattoo this whole book on myself!
For those who don't know - Public Domain Review is a site that publishes many curious and beautiful things form, well, public domain. So everything that's collected in this book is, basically, open to public. What this book provides (apart form a very pleasurable experience of having a physical book) is an amazing curatorial choices, putting the images in a continuous 'narrative', without over-explaining or moralizing. I think it's an amazing book for artistic inspiration or just to have as a bit of a curiosity cabinet.
For those who don't know - Public Domain Review is a site that publishes many curious and beautiful things form, well, public domain. So everything that's collected in this book is, basically, open to public. What this book provides (apart form a very pleasurable experience of having a physical book) is an amazing curatorial choices, putting the images in a continuous 'narrative', without over-explaining or moralizing. I think it's an amazing book for artistic inspiration or just to have as a bit of a curiosity cabinet.
January 30, 2023
This is a truly stunning collection of the works of art humanity has used, across time and cultures, to understand and comment upon the world around us. Beautiful, humorous, disturbing, bizarre, educational--it's all here in these archives.
June 3, 2022
As a longtime fan of The Public Domain Review, the moment I saw that its founder and editor, Adam Green, was crowdfunding a high-end picture book, sourcing its images from the vast archive of the digitized public domain, I knew I wanted in. Well, the book is finally here, and it exceeds all expectations. This, Affinities, has immediately become a favorite book of all time. I say this with all the utter certainty of the rarely stricken. I’d put a proper review here, but I’m going to need some time….
August 18, 2022
After encountering this book do I feel like I better understand what could be meant by Kant's quip that beauty is "the free play of the imagination." This book consists of hundreds of images from the public domain, and brief descriptions of them (including the author/artist/photographer and date; barely anything else). How could something as minimalistic as this afford extraordinary experiences, one might first wonder? At first, the preface and introductions of this book seemed high-flown. They state ideas along the lines that while the purpose of space is to keep things apart from one another, the purpose of time is to provide the possibilities for things to make contact again, to discover one another and be seen for their affinities. They also state ideas along the lines that in our modern algorithm dominated age, focus on gratifying immediate interests and pleasures is the organizing principle of the information we encounter. In contrast, this book offers information organized in a way that is respectful to inner truths of humanity (I'll give examples of such truths below), which might not gratify our immediate pleasures, but which, if we make an effort to engage in, will transform us.
The book does not fail at delivering the opportunities for experiences that make these ideas not high-flown at all. This book is kind of miraculous; I have never before been able to look at images alone and have my mind inspired to think up of all sorts of ideas that are truthful, beautiful, meaningful, unexpected, creative. The power of this book to inspire the mind comes from Adam Green's genius of curation. He has ideas of how images are to be related, and he lays them out for the reader to be inspired and provoked. In other words, this book is like an exquisite, fantastical playground for the mind; one cannot help but find one's mind playing all sorts of tricks, magical tricks that spark beauty into one's present.
From what I picked up on, the images generally transition between certain thematic elements of the universe or world, (e.g., nonhuman animals; the vegetable kingdom or flora; human physiology or biology; the first signs or symbols or gestures; far off places in the world like the deep sea or far north; drugs and hypnotism; mazes; maps and representations of the world). Whenever a new element is introduced, the general pattern of these images is that we first see earlier human makings (reproductions of etchings, paintings, engravings) that have a naive take on this element - naive in the sense that the element is seen as something mind-independent, frightening, or other. Second, we see later human makings that show that humans have become aware of our role in the conceptualization or representation of this element. Third, we see later developments that show that humans "own" these representations and become creative with them; they come to re-envision, or engage in fantasizing or theorizing about this element. This order from naivete, to representation, to re-imagination is only rarely chronological with respect to human history, as the images will show. It is amazing to see how very early humans engage in the re- imaginative mode upon elements, for example.
Let me give some examples from this book, of images involved, and the sorts of discoveries and realizations they inspire. The book starts off with Robert Fludd's "Utriusque cosmi... historia (1617)" which is essentially a black square, which the author inspired on the edges "Et sic in infinitum" ("and so on to infinity"). It is remarkable to see a thinker from that long ago being aware of the infinity of nothingness of the universe, which preceded and surrounds our human world. After this image, we get various images from the East and West from around the 14th-16th centuries showing circles that stand for planets or globes. Contemplating each is suggestive of differences in the cosmologies between cultures and eras. It eventually transitions into a photograph of blind children touching a large globe with geographical features protruding from it from 1914; and then an image of an ancient African sculpture of a man steadily holding his stomach, protruding like a globe. There is so much poetry to be sparked from this juxtaposition of Gods having created the universe, to blind children learning to see the world through touching a globe created by mankind; and then to a man holding his stomach, like the world or universe within him. The idea of the blind as incapable of seeing but as figuring out the world around them through touch -- through touch, it is almost as if they were creating the world they were seeing, a thought suggested by previous images of Gods creating the universe through their touch. And then the man holding his stomach -- this suggests to me how in the end it is we, mankind, who are coming up with the mythologies of Gods, and with the conceptions of the vastness of the universe. It's all within us.
There's another sequence I particularly loved. We get images from the black death, the plague. We get "Fool's cap map of the world" (1590) which shows geometry of a jester's hat as the geometry of a map of the world. Where the face of the jester should be is the world. It is a terrifying image; faceless, without eyes. There are quotes like "All is vanity..." inscribed in the corners of the map. One can only imagine the heft of these words and this image when it was created, when everyone and everything was dying around oneself. The jester as both providing entertainment, as detached from the real world and its demands; and as capable of getting us to encounter suppressed and deeper truths and emotions based in the real world, because its medium is make-believe and we aren't as intimated or are able to ease our way in -- with the world inside of its face, and the signs of death everywhere, this is a very haunting image. We get more images and etchings from this time period, portraying dying people and symbols of death. But then we get Agostino Ramelli's "Le diverse et artificiose machine" (1588). This shows a man at a bizarre contraption he has built; it looks like a water wheel, like at a windmill, but at its rungs are placed shelves which can hold books opened at precise pages chosen by the wheel's user. Adam Green adds on the description that Ramelli wrote that he envisioned this machine to be of use to "anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout." Following this, we get images of reference books, teaching people how to read by associating images with letters and words. Then, we get images of musical instruments, and even people dancing. It is a trite and humdrum idea that people who end up most obsessively studying or making art are those who were sick or were cut off from the everyday human world in some way (e.g., the idea of being a 'nerd'). But these images are profound and treat this idea in a whole new way. Thinking about historically, how the plague would've forced people to despair about life itself, and to make sense of this despair, to survive when everyone else was dying - this would drive some to read and create ideas and art. We have to create our own beauty when the world around is falling apart. We do this through making books and reading them; through playing music and dancing. It's not only that death everywhere or physical illness would make one physically incapable of going out into the everyday world; it's also the despair in having such illness that psychologically drives one to seek out beauty, and its this seeking that's sometimes necessary for creation and discovery. The images Adam Green lays out here evokes such thoughts.
Another sequence I really loved: we get Odilon Redon's response to the works of Edgar Allan Poe 'The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts towards infinity' (1882). This is a gothic etching, which shows an eye, looking upwards, as a sort of aircraft or hot air balloon, pulling a disembodied head upwards into the sky. Then, we get Claude-Nicolas Ledeoux's "L'Archietecture consideree" (1804), which is an illustration of a close up of an eye, where a classic greek theater is shown within the eye, like a mirror. Then we get Thomas Baldwin's "A circular view from the balloon at its greatest elevation" (1786), which is an illustration of various layers of clouds, segmented into co-centric circles; it suggests the layers of clouds the person ascended through, as they got higher and higher up in the balloon. These images make me think of our becoming self-aware of how our conditions already built into subjectivity, like our visual system, limits what we can possibly access, and leads us to what we end up experiencing and accessing. There is a sort of despair to this, as in Redon's gothic etching. The eye with the theater reflected in it makes me think of how we can sometimes sense ourselves like actors on a stage; the image itself suggests that the person whose eye is depicted must be standing on the stage, for the rows of seats for the audience is reflected. But because it is reflected upon the eye, this suggests how this is an illusion or delusion that's built into us perhaps; the audience being there is just our imagination. Moreover, the seats are all empty in this reflection. There is a loneliness, distance from others and humanity, conveyed by this image. When we get Baldwin's abstracted illustration of ascension by balloon, given its embeddedness within this sequence of the two previous images, it makes me think of our becoming capable of increasing distance from our own thoughts and perceptions. We ascend, as on a hot air balloon, from the ground, where our initial thoughts and perceptions occurred. Through this ascension, we can see how tiny and fragile those initial things were; and how there are so many clouds that separate us from the ground, like layers of conceptual mediation, or the mediation of other sorts of factors, responsible for those thoughts and perceptions. Or, these clouds could be likened to the steps in reflection, in our ascension away from the ground, which keep us nice and separate from the ground. When we reflect upon our thoughts, then reflect upon those reflections, and so on, each moment or layer of reflection is a new sui generis experience, which takes up our attention, and brings us more temporally and topically away from the original ground. But clouds are empty; they lack solidity. So too, perhaps, is the nature of many of our reflections.
I could go on and on with rambling about moments in this book that particularly spurred the free play of my imagination. The book gives literally dozens upon dozens of such moments of inspiration of creativity and sublimity. I can't wait to have this book for years to come, to be able to return to it again and again. It seems like the kind of work where new ideas can be readily discovered upon every time of return. If you're tempted to get this book, do not hesitate! This might be the best use of $50 in my life so far :-)
The book does not fail at delivering the opportunities for experiences that make these ideas not high-flown at all. This book is kind of miraculous; I have never before been able to look at images alone and have my mind inspired to think up of all sorts of ideas that are truthful, beautiful, meaningful, unexpected, creative. The power of this book to inspire the mind comes from Adam Green's genius of curation. He has ideas of how images are to be related, and he lays them out for the reader to be inspired and provoked. In other words, this book is like an exquisite, fantastical playground for the mind; one cannot help but find one's mind playing all sorts of tricks, magical tricks that spark beauty into one's present.
From what I picked up on, the images generally transition between certain thematic elements of the universe or world, (e.g., nonhuman animals; the vegetable kingdom or flora; human physiology or biology; the first signs or symbols or gestures; far off places in the world like the deep sea or far north; drugs and hypnotism; mazes; maps and representations of the world). Whenever a new element is introduced, the general pattern of these images is that we first see earlier human makings (reproductions of etchings, paintings, engravings) that have a naive take on this element - naive in the sense that the element is seen as something mind-independent, frightening, or other. Second, we see later human makings that show that humans have become aware of our role in the conceptualization or representation of this element. Third, we see later developments that show that humans "own" these representations and become creative with them; they come to re-envision, or engage in fantasizing or theorizing about this element. This order from naivete, to representation, to re-imagination is only rarely chronological with respect to human history, as the images will show. It is amazing to see how very early humans engage in the re- imaginative mode upon elements, for example.
Let me give some examples from this book, of images involved, and the sorts of discoveries and realizations they inspire. The book starts off with Robert Fludd's "Utriusque cosmi... historia (1617)" which is essentially a black square, which the author inspired on the edges "Et sic in infinitum" ("and so on to infinity"). It is remarkable to see a thinker from that long ago being aware of the infinity of nothingness of the universe, which preceded and surrounds our human world. After this image, we get various images from the East and West from around the 14th-16th centuries showing circles that stand for planets or globes. Contemplating each is suggestive of differences in the cosmologies between cultures and eras. It eventually transitions into a photograph of blind children touching a large globe with geographical features protruding from it from 1914; and then an image of an ancient African sculpture of a man steadily holding his stomach, protruding like a globe. There is so much poetry to be sparked from this juxtaposition of Gods having created the universe, to blind children learning to see the world through touching a globe created by mankind; and then to a man holding his stomach, like the world or universe within him. The idea of the blind as incapable of seeing but as figuring out the world around them through touch -- through touch, it is almost as if they were creating the world they were seeing, a thought suggested by previous images of Gods creating the universe through their touch. And then the man holding his stomach -- this suggests to me how in the end it is we, mankind, who are coming up with the mythologies of Gods, and with the conceptions of the vastness of the universe. It's all within us.
There's another sequence I particularly loved. We get images from the black death, the plague. We get "Fool's cap map of the world" (1590) which shows geometry of a jester's hat as the geometry of a map of the world. Where the face of the jester should be is the world. It is a terrifying image; faceless, without eyes. There are quotes like "All is vanity..." inscribed in the corners of the map. One can only imagine the heft of these words and this image when it was created, when everyone and everything was dying around oneself. The jester as both providing entertainment, as detached from the real world and its demands; and as capable of getting us to encounter suppressed and deeper truths and emotions based in the real world, because its medium is make-believe and we aren't as intimated or are able to ease our way in -- with the world inside of its face, and the signs of death everywhere, this is a very haunting image. We get more images and etchings from this time period, portraying dying people and symbols of death. But then we get Agostino Ramelli's "Le diverse et artificiose machine" (1588). This shows a man at a bizarre contraption he has built; it looks like a water wheel, like at a windmill, but at its rungs are placed shelves which can hold books opened at precise pages chosen by the wheel's user. Adam Green adds on the description that Ramelli wrote that he envisioned this machine to be of use to "anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout." Following this, we get images of reference books, teaching people how to read by associating images with letters and words. Then, we get images of musical instruments, and even people dancing. It is a trite and humdrum idea that people who end up most obsessively studying or making art are those who were sick or were cut off from the everyday human world in some way (e.g., the idea of being a 'nerd'). But these images are profound and treat this idea in a whole new way. Thinking about historically, how the plague would've forced people to despair about life itself, and to make sense of this despair, to survive when everyone else was dying - this would drive some to read and create ideas and art. We have to create our own beauty when the world around is falling apart. We do this through making books and reading them; through playing music and dancing. It's not only that death everywhere or physical illness would make one physically incapable of going out into the everyday world; it's also the despair in having such illness that psychologically drives one to seek out beauty, and its this seeking that's sometimes necessary for creation and discovery. The images Adam Green lays out here evokes such thoughts.
Another sequence I really loved: we get Odilon Redon's response to the works of Edgar Allan Poe 'The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts towards infinity' (1882). This is a gothic etching, which shows an eye, looking upwards, as a sort of aircraft or hot air balloon, pulling a disembodied head upwards into the sky. Then, we get Claude-Nicolas Ledeoux's "L'Archietecture consideree" (1804), which is an illustration of a close up of an eye, where a classic greek theater is shown within the eye, like a mirror. Then we get Thomas Baldwin's "A circular view from the balloon at its greatest elevation" (1786), which is an illustration of various layers of clouds, segmented into co-centric circles; it suggests the layers of clouds the person ascended through, as they got higher and higher up in the balloon. These images make me think of our becoming self-aware of how our conditions already built into subjectivity, like our visual system, limits what we can possibly access, and leads us to what we end up experiencing and accessing. There is a sort of despair to this, as in Redon's gothic etching. The eye with the theater reflected in it makes me think of how we can sometimes sense ourselves like actors on a stage; the image itself suggests that the person whose eye is depicted must be standing on the stage, for the rows of seats for the audience is reflected. But because it is reflected upon the eye, this suggests how this is an illusion or delusion that's built into us perhaps; the audience being there is just our imagination. Moreover, the seats are all empty in this reflection. There is a loneliness, distance from others and humanity, conveyed by this image. When we get Baldwin's abstracted illustration of ascension by balloon, given its embeddedness within this sequence of the two previous images, it makes me think of our becoming capable of increasing distance from our own thoughts and perceptions. We ascend, as on a hot air balloon, from the ground, where our initial thoughts and perceptions occurred. Through this ascension, we can see how tiny and fragile those initial things were; and how there are so many clouds that separate us from the ground, like layers of conceptual mediation, or the mediation of other sorts of factors, responsible for those thoughts and perceptions. Or, these clouds could be likened to the steps in reflection, in our ascension away from the ground, which keep us nice and separate from the ground. When we reflect upon our thoughts, then reflect upon those reflections, and so on, each moment or layer of reflection is a new sui generis experience, which takes up our attention, and brings us more temporally and topically away from the original ground. But clouds are empty; they lack solidity. So too, perhaps, is the nature of many of our reflections.
I could go on and on with rambling about moments in this book that particularly spurred the free play of my imagination. The book gives literally dozens upon dozens of such moments of inspiration of creativity and sublimity. I can't wait to have this book for years to come, to be able to return to it again and again. It seems like the kind of work where new ideas can be readily discovered upon every time of return. If you're tempted to get this book, do not hesitate! This might be the best use of $50 in my life so far :-)
January 7, 2024
A wonderful collection of beautiful images. I was a baker and am a longtime fan of THE PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW and have not been disappointed. All my favorite images collected in one book, so many new ones additionally, a book made from the beauty of associations and the unspoken links between so many entities in this world. A true creativityspark and one of my priced possessions on my bookshelf! For those who complain about the size of the typography (some do over on Amazon): it is NOT TOO SMALL and very elegant. I suggest the authors of such reviews get glasses or a magnifying glass and stop complaining, as most readers do not have problems with it. Very well designed and beautifully printed.
Maybe I would have chosen another cover binding instead of linen, as it looks elegant but gets dirty SO easily, so one has to be super catious with it which I do not like, as I want my books to be sturdy and often to be held; looked at - or with a chance to clean it a bit...
Maybe I would have chosen another cover binding instead of linen, as it looks elegant but gets dirty SO easily, so one has to be super catious with it which I do not like, as I want my books to be sturdy and often to be held; looked at - or with a chance to clean it a bit...
January 5, 2023
An amazing dive through centuries of art in a wide variety of forms. Interestingly, the book isn't structured in any expected way - there's no chronological or category organization. Instead the series of images gradually morphs from one subject to another, moving from death to outer space to cartography to portraits. It's also packed with notes on each piece, with many of them getting extended notes with short stories and quotations included. It's one of the most unique art books I read in 2022. There's a feeling of smallness and awe that comes from looking at the similarities and differences from between works of art two centuries apart pondering the same subject matter. Highly recommend it for anyone who loves art books.
Read
May 9, 2023I found a number of lovely works, though I thought the book opened a bit slowly. Some of the affinities were a touch simplistic -- I preferred ones that were more visual echoes or transformations and less two versions of the same thing. The extended notes were interesting where available. I'm not a regular reader of the website, and most pieces were new to me.
Read
January 3, 2024I love books like this. It's decidedly a coffee table volume and not a cheap one at that, so already there's the distance of money and art world familiarity making this book for everyone. That said, I thought it started some interesting connections to share with others. Felt limited in which art was included?
May 10, 2024
One of the most beautiful volumes of art and imagery I’ve ever seen. Magical.
December 11, 2024
It's a such an eye candy and a peeping view in the history almost before 20th century. I like there is no correct way to read this and it's like "make your adventure".
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews