The first time I heard the opening strains of An American in Paris, the first time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, the first time I saw Sean Kernan’s photograph Book with Nails, my heart and mind stopped for a moment and them moved to another plane never to forget the experience, pained by thoughts of beauty and dread. In June of 1998, I attended a group show at Sarah Morthland Gallery called "Inventors and Alchemists." In the show was a group of photographs called The Reason for Everything. This simple but sophisticated work recalls a pop-up book for very knowing children created by a magic realist to dazzle and entertain. There are other artists who use the book in intriguing ways as subject: for example, Abelado Morrell, Fawn Potash and Mark Power. Each says something different. In this work the book lies open, flat like a stage. The words may or may not be important because they are obscured with small vignettes of human limbs, fetish items, and optical illusions. Sometime, like in modern drama, the stage becomes a character. The picture Book with Nails was not in the show. I saw it in the back room. It’s a simple statement, a book driven through with concrete nails, yet its powerful enough to give me chills, to evoke and call to mind many images from western iconography to tribal fetish piercing, to ideas of censorship and control of knowledge. The picture projects evil, pulls you in with glamour that makes you search for meaning. Over the years it keeps returning to my eyes. It still creates a sensation in me that is always uneasy, as if the book were human flesh. It makes me ask if I should care. A good photograph can be beautiful; it can also be strange and engaging.