Beautiful Pig (NUMBERED AND SIGNED)

Ben Schonberger
Beautiful Pig (NUMBERED AND SIGNED)

Photographs: Ben Schonberger

Text: Chad Alligood

Publisher: Self-published

134 pages

Year: 2013

Comments: Softcover, 35,5 x 25,5 cm, color photographs. It comes with a unsigned print. First edition limited to 100 copies. In very good condition other than traces of use. Text in English. Signed by Ben Schonberger.

Centered on a trove of photographs and ephemera collected by a former Detroit police officer during the latter part of the 20th Century, purposefully assembled and augmented by the artist, Beautiful Pig offers a provocative, timely, and unblinking look at cultural identity, self-perception, and the realities of racial disparity in law enforcement.

The project began when Schonberger, while working in Detroit, acquired a box of photographs from Marty Gaynor, a retired police officer. Gaynor had documented the entirety of his career through thousands of images, including countless Polaroids of individuals he had arrested. Intrigued by the scope of the collection and the man responsible for amassing it, Schonberger embarked on a years-long collaborative process with Gaynor. The result is in an intensely personal yet culturally and historically revealing archive.

Beautiful Pig appeared in 2013 as a self-published book to overwhelming critical acclaim. It was shortlisted by both the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Award in 2013 and the Anamorphosis Prize in 2015. Today the book can be found in the New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MoMA, the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, The Arts Library at Yale University, and nearly a dozen other cultural institutions.