Thinking Twice

Photo essays of unsettling beauty, ethics, and perception.

Thinking Twice is a photographic exploration by Phyllis Crowley that transforms the ordinary and often unsettling realities of food markets around the world into meditations on beauty, mortality, and culture. Shot across Mexico, Vietnam, Spain, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Italy, and the United States, the series captures meat, fish, and other market fare in vivid, painterly compositions that blur the boundary between attraction and aversion.

Accompanied by essays from art critic Zachary Fine ("The Unlikely Sublime") and artist-curator Deborah Hesse ("Epilogue"), the book situates Crowley's photographs within a lineage of artists who confront the ethics and aesthetics of consumption. Fine argues that Crowley overturns Kant's notion that disgust destroys beauty-her lens transforms repulsion into wonder-while Hesse highlights the ecological and moral questions embedded in our food systems.

Crowley's accompanying text, Thoughts on the Thinking Twice Series, traces her fascination with food markets since her first encounter in Mexico in 2009, where glistening sheets of meat and seafood hung like tapestries in the light. Her work reveals a tension between reverence for life and acknowledgment of death, between cultural ritual and individual discomfort.

Published by OctoberWorks and designed by Jeanne Criscola, Thinking Twice embodies the imprint's commitment to intentional, design-forward publishing. It is a meditation on seeing - urging us, as the title suggests, to "think twice" to hold death and beauty, ethics and aesthetics, in our minds at once.