Gary Richman’s twelfth Blue Book combines his characteristic collages into a macabre multiple choice game that is at once suggestive of Mexican Milagros crucifixes and 19th century phrenological charts of the deviant and insane. 

The anchoring point of each identity mystery is a found photograph around which Richman arranges systems of images that seem to have a sinister logic. Whether housewives, children, or blue-collar workers, they are all implicated in an ambiguous iconography of fantasies, phobias, and criminality. The compositions are each captioned with a cryptic question that invites the reader (and amateur pathologist) to choose between a set of symbols (tattoos?) in vertical boxes marked A, B, C, D or E,

One pious looking woman, finds comfort in Catholicism, the texts suggests, but she is threatened by a several options.  Is it ‘A’ the harlequin? ‘D’ the box cutters? ‘E’ the dentures ? Or perhaps she is really the Humpty Dumpty of box ‘C’, and at any moment ready to break into as many pieces as there are beads on her Rosary.