Goodbye Suzanne Bloom

A Bibliophilic Photographer

I remember being very excited the first time I saw work by MANUAL, the two-person photographic team. It was an exhibit at the Glassell School sometime in the 1980s. It was a group show of artists collaborating with writers, which excited me because of my comics background. Because of the nature of the show, I assumed one of the members of MANUAL was a poet and the other a photographer. I was wrong, of course. Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, the two members of MANUAL, are equal partners in artmaking. Or were. According to an email I just got from Moody Gallery, which represented MANUAL for years, Suzanne Bloom died on February 4 of this year.

MANUAL, The Pawn Game (Jose Raul Capablanca), archival digital print, 2012

To quote Belle and Sebastian, Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill were wrapped up in books. Their work wasn’t literary—it wasn’t about marrying the written word with the photographed image. It was about books as physical objects, as codices. They celebrated the physical qualities of a book, including the fact that books are made out of forests. Their most recent exhibit at Moody Gallery was on this relationship between books and trees, which I wrote about at the time. (“Codex” is an ancient word for book that comes from the Latin word caudex, which mean a block of wood.)

MANUAL, The Triumph of the Tree (by John Stewart Collis), Day, archival digital print, 2023

The pair were married and have been teaching at the University of Houston since the mid-70s. Like a lot of photographers who came into prominence in that period, MANUAL produced highly staged photographs that not only bordered on surreal, but had an intensely hyperreal look. Think of photographers like Sandy Skoglund of Nic Nicosia. For me, MANUAL belongs in that group. (I assume this style of photography has a name, but I don’t know what it is.)

Focusing on one subject for your entire artistic career could be a recipe for producing repetitive work. As a viewer of their work for decades, I was never bored by it. If you think books are inherently dull, MANUAL’s work might not be for you. But for a book-lover like me, Suzanne Bloom’s death is an artistic blow.

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