© Kent Rogo wsKi
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
HELP ME, HELP YOU
IN HIS LATEST PROJECT, PHOTOGRAPHER KENT ROGOWSKI CONSIDERS THE DESIRE TO
BETTER ONE’S LIFE THROUGH THE SELF-HELP BOOK. BY CONOR RISCH
THE IMPULSE TO IMPROVE one’s lot in life is central to photographer Kent
Rogowski’s new fine-art project, “Everything I Wish I Could Be,” a series of still
lifes he created by amassing, arranging and photographing hundreds of self-help
books.
Rogowski became interested in photographing self-help books as a way to
consider “how people deal with moments of change in their lives,” he says. The
project also fit into Rogowski’s practice of taking objects or images common to
The language of self-help books, and the way the titles of self-help books
relate to each other, provide the structural underpinning for Kent Rogowski’s series,
“Everything I Wish I Could Be.”
popular culture and presenting them in a way that causes readers to reconsider
their significance. For his series “Love = Love,” for instance, he found a way to combine pieces of jigsaw puzzles of landscapes and floral arrangements. For “Bears,”
he turned teddy bears inside out and made photographs of them on white seamless—making them look at once cute, frightening and delightfully grotesque.
Initially he set out to find and photograph the notes that people made in the
margins of the books, which showed how people “take something intended for
this mass audience and interact with it to personalize it for themselves.”
Finding books with readers’ notes in them proved difficult, though. Used book-
sellers didn’t accept books that had been written in, and Rogowski’s friends were
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