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From Sophy Rickett, Pissing Women, 1995
In 1994, Sophy Rickett began photographing herself and her friends pissing on the streets of London. Shot at night, dressed up in officewear, a bodily function usually performed discreetly by women was staged openly in public, an act normally reserved for men. Roaming London’s financial district after hours, the resulting images – deadpan and performative – would become Rickett’s seminal series Pissing Women, now published in its entirety by Climax Books for the first time.
Pissing Women was made at an extraordinary, era-defining time. The early internet was about to break and give way to a whole new landscape: unregulated and chaotic. Video surveillance lined the streets of London following the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing. Sensing this unease of city life after finishing art school, Sophy Rickett was part of a new generation of female photographers looking simultaneously inwards and outwards, subverting their everyday lived experience and reframing it as social commentary. In doing so, they confronted themselves and their place within a new digital age.
Available from the ICA Bookshop.
Pissing Women is the first publication of Climax Books and comprises 26 photographic plates. It features a foreword by Anne Turyn, a New York-based photographer and the founder of the cult prose periodical Top Stories, and a longform interview with Sophy Rickett. The book was edited by Isabella Burley and designed by Christopher Lawson.
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