With each issue of Public Domain, we invite a distinct voice to select a sequence of images culled from the public domain. The expansion of accessible grants, broadband internet and affordable scanning technology have made available massive caches of otherwise inaccessible material, formerly silently sitting in institutions around the world. With this publication we willfully reanimate these archives by putting their holdings back into circulation.

Our first issue is a collaboration between Felix Bernstein & Gabe Rubin touching on the history of connoisseurship, the aestheticist/decadent fetishization of the “parts” of a book that reached a peak in Victorian queer journals, the comparisons of gestures from multiple eras by Aby Warburg and how this has become standardized via algorithms, always with an awareness of what is emphasized in this mode of visual comparison of similar “parts” and what is lost.

67 pages.

8.5 x 11 in.