The astounding thing about Maggie Taylor is that she pushes forward by reaching backward. It was a treat while looking at the early images in this book to recall that at one point my Yale classmate (an undergraduate philosophy major and freshman admirer of Chaucer's smale foweles) was making fairly straightforward images of collected objects. Still-or stilled, as they often included real fish, bruised pears, dewy eggs, and stuffed birds-life constructions with a healthy sprinkling of Surrealism and Braque. Pre-digital, she made the most of assemblage before the lens to convey her whimsical and occasionally ominous notions of anachronistic transport. Her symbolism was lyrically rich, and delivered with an intense, almost radioactive color palette that, if Album's color plates are to be trusted, charges the early images with an unearthly glow.




A yearning for such asynchronous departure may be at the heart of her more recent and familiar work. The latter two chapters of the book concentrate on post-1998 pieces, with one section devoted to her project "Almost Alice" (she produced 44 photographs to accompany a 2008 Modernbook Editions publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland). The wealth and abundance of material in this book affords readers and historians a more thorough experience of Taylor's creative accomplishments (though you'll need your Italian to access Mauro Fiorese's text, "Il Magico Album di Maggie Taylor"). It also gives a peak behind the master's curtain; the more we see of her imagery, the more apparent her reuse of certain source material becomes. This is not a drawback; her photographs gain an air of collective identity and conceptual sureness as we note the reappearance in slightly different guises of familiar faces or postures. Truly, then, this is an affective, effective album (squishy covers and all) that embraces and articulates Taylor's fertile imagination and the remarkably reinvigorated family of 19th-century faces that populates it. Taylor's invented worlds are emotionally remindful of photographs by Arthur Tress and the ParkeHarrisons, though her preference for working sans camera posits scenarios entirely and ingeniously crafted in service of surprise and delight, lands of wonder that naturally accompany Alice's adventures and other flights of fancy. —George Slade