MANUAL: The Collaboration of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, 1974–2024
Moody Gallery, Houston · Through April 25, 2026
Presented in conjunction with FotoFest 2026 Biennial — “Participatory Futures”
I first encountered MANUAL’s work around 2018. I was new to navigating the contemporary art world, still searching with tools built for art history, which meant I kept hitting dead ends. MANUAL doesn’t live in textbooks. You find them through galleries, through FotoFest, through the quiet network of people who have been paying attention for decades.
But their book photographs found me anyway, and they stopped me cold.
What I saw (without yet having language for it) was an act of consecration. Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom had taken the physical book, the codex, the beloved object, and rendered it with the full formal attention the Western still-life tradition brings to fruit, skull, and candle. The result was more than documentation; it was devotion.
“MANUAL didn’t document books; they consecrated them.”
Coming back to their work this year, for a survey spanning fifty years at Moody Gallery, I could finally see what I only felt in 2018.
The book photographs belong to a much larger project, one that treats photography itself as a subject, that photographs Polaroids, layers images within images, references art history from inside the frame. The name they chose in 1974 says it all: MANUAL. They elevated the handmade, instructional, the doing of a thing, as opposed to the automation of it.
Over fifty years and more than twenty discrete project series, that name held.
Suzanne Bloom died in February 2025, just over a year before this retrospective opened. Walking through the exhibition with that knowledge changes the weight of everything on the walls. For me, first there was awe in seeing more of their lifetime of work. Then there was a pang of grief at not having known them better. They made a thing together that has its own integrity. And like many legacies, it doesn’t need them to continue in order to be what it is.
“They made a thing together that has its own integrity.
What the books do
Here is the theory I have been turning over since 2018.
The reader, the real reader (the person for whom a physical book is a beloved object and not merely a container for text) brings an accumulated somatic history to any encounter with a book as object: the weight of it, the texture of the page, the smell…, the physical act of holding a world.
These are sensory memories linked to genuine experiences of absorption, discovery, the expansion of the self into new territory.
MANUAL’s photographs release the book from its utility and hold it in suspension, where all of that accumulated meaning can be apprehended at once.
For the reader, it’s recognition, a flood of good feeling whose source may not be immediately legible but is immediately felt.
For the person who has not yet loved a physical book, the photograph may plant the association in advance: here is what this object is worth, before you’ve held one.
“For the reader, it’s recognition. For the uninitiated, the photograph may plant the association before they’ve ever held one.”
That is not a small thing to ask of a still photograph. MANUAL asked it, and delivered.
Why it matters now
The ecological thread running through fifty years of MANUAL’s work: the forest photographs, the nature projects, the references to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, is not decoration.
It is the same grief, differently located: grief for a world of things that are passing. Books. Pre-digital photographic materials. Old-growth forest. Things we did not think to mourn until they were already going.
“MANUAL’s ecological grief and their love of books are the same grief for things we didn’t think to mourn until they were already going.”
I make assemblage sculpture and photographic work with salvaged materials — circuit boards among them. The question MANUAL kept asking across fifty years: what does it mean to make something by hand when the machine can do it faster, when the image is everywhere, when the object is obsolete, isn’t a nostalgic question. The question involves survival. The answer they gave, again and again, was the same: you consecrate it. You bring the full formal attention of the tradition to bear on the thing that is passing, and you hold it in suspension where its meaning can be felt all at once.
Whether a sensory photograph of a circuit board can do for an engineer what MANUAL’s book photographs do for a reader — whether I can make an image that activates the initiated and plants something in everyone else — I don’t know yet. But MANUAL showed me what the standard is.
— Brandi Hamilton
Assemblage artist and veteran-owned creative based in Southeast Texas
brandihamilton.com
