Redemption Songs

Book excerpt: An artist's book/zine of images by Theo Strasser, consisting of collaged black and white artwork overprinted on the title page and many other pages drawn from a copy of the London publisher Pickering & Inglis' hymnal "Redemption songs: a choice collection of one thousand hymns and choruses for evangelistic meetings, soloists, choirs, the home" (dating from the late 19th or early 20th century). The use of a religious work as a base for an altered photographic book may have been suggested by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin's "Holy Bible" (2013), although Theo Strasser's Redemption Songs is a more oblique and personal selection, presented in a small stitched booklet with black card covers (the same size as the original, though with fewer pages), with the title stamped in silver and a cross stamped in red on the cover.