$35.00
23% Pure, by Jeffrey Kilmer
A collection of Jeffrey Kilmer's color portrait photographs.
Hardcover, 8 x 10 inches. 160 pages. Limited edition of 750.
Jeffrey Kilmer's collection of portraits "23% Pure" is a bracing, provocative debut. Over seven years this New York photographer traveled throughout North America and Europe and captured hundreds of young men, most of them emerging artists and musicians, in the uncertain terrain between adolescence and full-blown adulthood. His rich color photographs render their features and fashions faithfully, and help them to construct identities that are both recognizable and authentically expressive.
Kilmer's working method, described by Jason Cole Mager in the book's essay, produces shots that seem off-hand but have an almost classical assurance. Incorporating lush pastoral and post-industrial backdrops, they are both gritty and elegiac. As critic Mike Albo observes in the book's introduction, these photos capture that brief, vanished moment in history when young people marketed themselves unguardedly online. The pictures also preserve, with unwavering precision and compassion, the tenuous, trembling youth of their subjects.