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Morgan Ashcom began Open while making photographs of daily life in Occupied Palestine in 2009. As Ashcom departed Palestine for his home in the United States, Israeli security forces opened his box of unprocessed film, exposing the images he had made to light. Assuming they were ruined, Ashcom left the mostly unexamined film in his studio for over ten years.
In 2021, Ashcom revisited the negatives and saw new potential in them: the film was not ruined; rather, the tenuously visible images referenced resiliency and vulnerability; censorship and subversion; erasure — and the possibility of its reversal.
Open is a unique object: a box referencing Ashcom’s film box in and of itself, suggesting a paradox: should you open the box, or are you forbidden from doing so? Inside rests a passport-like book containing 34 pictures. Translucent paper overlays and obscures the imagery with code fragments from communications between international financial institutions, Wajdi Yaeesh, and Ashcom, as they attempted to sell c-prints from Open to raise funds for a Palestinian children’s charity.
Published by Gnomic Book
Edition of 750
Softcover in a box
148 pages
173 x 213 mm
ISBN 9781957301983
