Natacha Merritt Digital Diaries – Inscribed by Eric Kroll

Description

Published by Taschen in 2000, Digital Diaries now looks startlingly prescient. Merritt used early consumer digital cameras to document herself, her lovers, her sex life, and the private world immediately around her, collapsing photographer, subject and diarist into the same person. Taschen published the resulting photographs at precisely the moment when digital photography, online exhibitionism, and the idea of documenting one’s life for strangers were beginning to converge. Merritt describes it as the first book of digital photographs ever published; whether or not one wants to make quite that absolute a claim, it was unquestionably very early—and looking at it a quarter-century later, it’s hard not to see Instagram, selfies, OnlyFans and the rest of our oversharing digital culture waiting in the wings.

And then there’s Eric Kroll. The photographer and editor encountered Merritt’s pictures on the internet and helped bring her work into print; his introduction, “Natacha Downloads,” opens the book. This copy has a particularly memorable association: Kroll has written — so sweetly, I might add — “I ate her out” across the top of his introduction and signed it. Subtle? No. Appropriate to the book, its subject, and Eric Kroll? Absolutely. It turns an already important early document of internet-age erotic photography into a wonderfully outrageous association copy.

A landmark of early digital erotic photography—with an Eric Kroll inscription you’re unlikely to forget.