GUADALUPE RUIZ — Ausgestopfte Tiere, Turbo Magazine No. 47, 2013

Guadalupe Ruiz, Ausgestopfte Tiere [Stuffed Animals]. Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie. Turbo Magazine, Nummer 47, Biel, Switzerland, October 2013. Staple-bound softcover; 14 × 20 cm; black-and-white offset printing. Numbered 11/200.

A small photographic publication by Guadalupe Ruiz devoted to taxidermied animals, issued as number 47 of the independent Swiss Turbo Magazine in an edition of 200 copies.

Purple wrappers frame a single specimen. Inside, the animals are introduced through their Latin names before the publication shifts almost entirely to image: birds, mammals and other preserved bodies photographed against neutral collection backgrounds. The format borrows directly from the visual language of the encyclopaedia. Species are named, separated and ordered; photographs function almost like specimen plates.

That structure would become increasingly important in Ruiz’s work. In 2015 she self-published Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie, a substantially larger project containing 645 photographs arranged across 37 thematic chapters. Ausgestopfte Tiere predates that book by two years and already contains the basic proposition in miniature: one category, one sequence, one system of looking.

The taxidermy adds another layer. These animals have already been removed from life, preserved and converted into specimens before Ruiz photographs them. Photography produces a second form of preservation; publication gives the resulting images another classification and another route into circulation. Animal becomes specimen. Specimen becomes photograph. Photograph becomes entry. The supposedly neutral structure of the reference book is therefore doing two things at once: cataloguing what is in front of the camera while revealing that every catalogue is also produced through selection.

For The New Rare, its interest lies partly in that early state. A modest numbered publication in which Ruiz is already testing the encyclopaedic format that would later expand into one of her principal artist books.

Condition: Good. Light handling and surface wear to wrappers, minor edge and corner wear consistent with age. Original handwritten inventory/price label retained to rear wrapper. Internally clean from the pages inspected. Numbered 11/200.

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