Battered Books, Tattered Covers: The Photos of Cara Barer and Abelardo Morell

Ron Hogan, the sharp-eyed senior editor of Galleycat (our bookish feline of a brother blog), recently noted the nascent trend of book covers sporting photographs of books that have seen better days. The examples he highlighted—The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas (published in March by Columbia University Press) and Michael Greenberg‘s Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, out next month from Other Press—both feature photos by Cara Barer. The Houston-based photographer describes her work as “primarily a documentation of a physical evolution” and an attempt to “blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography.”