Antony Cairns - Signed - CTY - 2018

CTY by Antony Cairns is an ambitious and highly distinctive survey of the British photographer’s ongoing investigation into the modern city. Published by MÖREL Books in 2018, the book brings together photographs from several of Cairns’s major urban projects, including work made in London, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Osaka. Rather than functioning as a conventional architectural record, CTY transforms the contemporary metropolis into something unstable, mysterious and almost science-fictional.

Cairns is interested in cities not simply as places but as constantly changing photographic subjects. His images often concentrate on buildings, construction sites, illuminated façades and fragments of urban infrastructure, particularly photographed at night. Architecture loses much of its conventional descriptive function and becomes an arrangement of light, texture, shadow and geometric forms. The city is recognisable, yet simultaneously rendered strange and unfamiliar.

This tension between documentation and abstraction is central to Cairns’s practice. He has developed a remarkably personal relationship with photographic processes, repeatedly looking back at historical technologies and printing methods while using them in unconventional ways. The resulting images occupy an intriguing territory between photography, abstraction and the material object. The urban landscape becomes almost archaeological, as though Cairns were photographing the remains of a future civilisation rather than the cities of the present.

CTY is particularly interesting because it brings together different stages and locations of this practice. Works originating in projects such as LDN3, LDN4, LPT and OSC are placed alongside one another, allowing connections to emerge between London, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Osaka. Despite their geographical differences, these cities appear to belong to the same imaginary metropolis: immense, artificial, illuminated and strangely detached from ordinary human experience.

The six texts by Simon Baker provide another important layer to the publication. Rather than functioning simply as conventional critical commentary, they take literary quotations from writers including J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, H. P. Lovecraft and Benjamin Péret as starting points for considering themes such as urbanisation, the ruined city, the abstract city and the endless city. These references reinforce the uncanny atmosphere of Cairns’s photographs and place his work within a broader history of speculative visions of the modern metropolis.

The physical construction of CTY is also fundamental to its character. The MÖREL Books edition contains 376 pages and measures approximately 161 × 216 mm. It was produced as a limited edition of only 750 copies and printed in duotone on rare pearl paper, a material choice that complements Cairns’s fascination with surfaces, reflections and unusual photographic reproduction.

What makes this particular copy especially desirable is that it is signed by Antony Cairns. A signed copy adds a direct connection between the physical book and the artist whose experimental photographic language defines it. In the case of CTY, this feels particularly appropriate: Cairns’s practice consistently questions where a photograph ends and where the photographic object begins. The signature consequently becomes part of the individual history of this specific copy rather than merely an additional mark of provenance.

This is also significant because the standard MÖREL edition was limited to 750 copies and is now out of print. MÖREL itself currently identifies the book as out of print, while signed copies have been specifically offered by specialist photography-book dealers.

For anyone interested in contemporary Photography Books that push against the conventional boundaries of documentary photography, CTY is an exceptional publication. It presents the city as both subject and raw material, transforming familiar urban environments into dark, luminous and unsettling abstractions. Cairns’s photographs seem to occupy a point somewhere between analogue photographic history and an imagined digital future, making CTY one of the most compelling examples of experimental urban photography of its period.

This is a signed first edition of a limited 750-copy publication, an important book within Antony Cairns’s body of work and a particularly strong example of the artist’s ability to transform the contemporary city into something simultaneously photographic, material and almost otherworldly.