Casebound, offset litho printing. A signed and numbered edition of 250 copies. A loose sheet of bible paper with publisher information is inserted into each book. Design by Chris Bedson (CBC Creative).

The only text printed in this book is the word 'Troy' on the cover then on a page after the sequence of images it says '1914 - 2015', the authors name is signed in pencil but not printed anywhere. What we see is a series of 19 diptychs, mostly very familiar images, on the left page a photograph of a beautiful, famous woman and on the right page a photograph of war. Sometimes you know both images are from the same moment - Raquel Welch and Vietnam, Pamela anderson and Iraq 1, Kim Kardashian and Syria. But in every case you feel that they are scenes from the same story, what you start to think about as you turn the pages is that the story is always the same but the way the story is told changes, and in interesting ways.

What Peter Mann is asking us to do is to look again at images which in many cases are extremely well known and to see them not as records of any particular moments but as scenes from a much larger story. The title of the book alludes to Homer's Illiad, which is arguably the foundation of western storytelling and is as far as we know an account of a real event but told in such a way that we respond to it entirely as fiction. As such what we are responding to is universal truths which are found somewhere in the balance of the impossible to comprehend reality of events and the way men and women try to tell the stories of those events to others, which often tells us just as much about themselves and the society they come from as it does about the supposed subject.

www.spbooks.org

Pages: 40
Place: London
Year: 2015
Publisher: SP Books
Size: 21 x 24 cm (approx.)

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