Elle Pérez: Devotions

Elle Pérez: Devotions
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
Author: Elle Pérez
Publisher: Aperture
Publication Date: September 2026
Print Length: 216 pages
Language: English
Price: paid paid paid

Elle Pérez: Devotions is the first monograph devoted to the artist’s work. It brings together more than a decade of photography and related material, covering projects made from 2009 to the present. Pérez’s images address love, desire, pain, pleasure, and vulnerability through portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and photographs of physical transformation. The book presents these subjects as part of an ongoing investigation into how people form relationships with one another and with their own bodies.

Pérez began photographing underground spaces in New York as a teenager. Those early images record communities built around freedom, friendship, and self-expression. Their later work includes portraits of friends and lovers, photographs of wrestlers, and images shaped by direct exchanges with the people pictured. Pérez describes trust as both the aim of the encounter and a formal strategy, making the relationship between photographer and subject central to the work.

The monograph also includes reproductions of notes, writings, postcards, screenshots, reference articles, and research materials. These elements provide insight into the artist’s working process and show how personal experience, cultural references, and studio research contribute to the finished photographs. Multimedia collages bring together influences from art and literature, while the sequencing of the book moves between documentary records and more constructed or imaginative images.

At the centre of Devotions is a selection of Pérez’s most important portraits from the past fifteen years. Many are held in museum collections across the United States. The photographs balance observation with performance, allowing subjects to control how they appear while remaining attentive to the physical and emotional conditions of the encounter. Pérez, a Rome Prize winner whose work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, uses the monograph to connect established images with the personal archive and research behind them.

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