The World Is All That Is The Case

Photographer Arthur Ou was born in Taipei and currently lives and works in New York. This publication is composed of his series of photographs of artists reading ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ by Ludwig Wittgenstein, with quotes from the book and an essay by Walter Benn Michaels. It is an intriguing theme for a series of portraits, because “pictures of people reading aren’t simply (or necessarily or even usually) portraits. In fact, if the default setting of the portrait involves posing for the photographer, it would be more fitting to say that a picture of someone reading is a kind of anti-portrait,” according to Michaels. The readers thus belong to the world defined by the camera.