In 2015 writer and curator Jarrett Earnest began carrying a small instant camera everywhere he went, photographing friends, artworks, parties, and sex. When people would ask, he’d say they weren’t photographs but “writing.” Over the next seven years this practice evolved into an interrogation of images and time, looking at Renaissance painting, contemporary sculpture, and video art, for example, through the medium of photography—and how images become nested into, and inseparable from, the layered narratives of our lives.

Valid Until Sunset brings together sixty of these photographs, each with a text on the facing page, creating a unique hybrid of art criticism, queer theory, and travelogue. The book seeks a new mode of address—a way of speaking to and against images—following philosopher Simone Weil’s method for understanding images, which is "not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”

On November 16th, 7:30 PM, Jarrett Earnest will perform excerpts of the book alongside projections, accompanied by cellist Anthime Miller, at International Objects (53 Scott Ave, Brooklyn, NY).