Robert Morgan, "Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Source book", pp. 210-220: "One outstanding example of a systemic narrative employing photographs is Michael Snow's 'Cover to Cover.' ... To encounter the complexity of his book ... is in some ways a cinematic experience. In other ways, it may be compared to the architectural illusions found in some Spanish mosques, given the layering of spatial disorientations and sequential ambiguity that Snow has presented between the covers of a book. A primary concern, for Snow, is that photographic representation exists in its own space as it exists concurrently in a surrounding environmental space which has the potential to intercede upon one's perception of an image. On the front cover, a detail of a door is photographed. On the back cover, the reverse of what appears as the same door is an image of the door re-photographed. This is indicated by the presence of the artist's finger holding the image. Throughout the book, the viewer is confronted with forward and backward views of objects and events related to the artist' life as he goes from his house to his car to his gallery and back to his house again. What may appear as a firsthand representation of reality is suddenly twice removed as the artist's hand is used to cover an image, thereby confounding our expectations of what we are seeing and how we are seeing it. Michael Snow's Cover to Cover surpasses the purely visual element on one level by elevating our cognizance of photographic imagery toward a multi-leveled strata of narrative."

Ref: GB/13102