From Victoria and Albert Museum database:

Artist's book featuring a series of printed photographic portraits which have been obliterated with black Indian ink. The photographs are framed within borders of a black background each superimposed with one or two other colours to give a two-tone effect. The borders are embellished with embossed patterns. Some of the photographs bear fragments of semi-obliterated text in Uzbek. Some of the photographs bear the printed name of the person in the portrait on the facing leaf with a brief printed summary of their political activity.

This collaboration between the artist Ken Campbell and photographer David King takes as its starting point a book published by the Soviet State Publishing House in 1934 to celebrate a decade of Soviet rule in Uzbekistan. The original book was designed by the Russian artist and designer Alexander Rodchenko. A few years after publication, during Stalin's purges, several of the party officials whose portraits appeared in the volume fell out of favour and were removed from office. Rodchenko defaced his own copy of the book, obliterating the portraits with thick black Indian ink. Ken Campbell has said how he found this 'an absolutely terrifying image; not a comment on the Soviet system, more a comment on the nature of censorship and self-censorship'. In this artist's book, enlarged photographic reproductions of the defaced portraits are printed opposite brief political biographies of the individuals, including their fates (where known). The portraits are printed in a frame, reminiscent of an icon. Some of the frames show where Campbell has fired staple guns into the zinc printing plates, so that the printing technique itself reflects the violence of the subject matter.

See also Additional Material: 3 double-sided page proofs:

Cover page. (folded)

A. Karimov.