A Grocer’s Orgy is an artist book that presents an alternate history of Lucas Blalock’s photography using new photographs and previously unseen versions of existing images from throughout his entire body of work. With a title drawn from Baudelaire’s writings on dandyism, the book is designed by Blalock to create new formal and thematic associations through the collaging of already densely layered photographs.

Linking together his earliest studio portraits with recent work utilizing overt digital alterations, Blalock builds on his recent approach of embedding additional photographs into the back of a single frame. The artist’s manipulations of images through erasures, cloning, and drawing emphasize what is absent or obliterated in his compositions, often with a poignancy and emotion that is lacking in most digital imagery. The book’s layout further complicates these photographs, with spreads that obscure the ability to determine where an image ends or begins. - Primary Information