Colored People: Home

In this first and only edition, Ruscha indirectly addresses the discourse around the term “colored people” by paradoxically depicting no literal persons anywhere. Instead, the first half of the book consists of fifteen offset color photos of cacti, succulents, palms, banana trees, and other desert vegetation, stripped of context and suspended against immaculate white. Completely blank, the glue-bound book’s remainder is further devoid of even these estranged specimens. Much can be read into this prickly publication in terms of (in)visibility, metaphor, alienation, representation, absence, and so on.