Softcover with printed edges and dust jacket
120 pages, 61 plates
8.25 x 11 in / 209.5 x 279.4 mm
ISBN 978-1-942953-87-6
TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Blue Women, a new monograph by artist Brea Souders.
Blue Women centers on storefront cosmetic posters—the kind that advertise the promise of improved hair, nails, or eyebrows—that have been sun-bleached over time to varying shades of blue. Rephotographed in situ across four continents, Souders' work traces the visual and material afterlife of commercial imagery as it is reshaped by natural forces: time, light, and weather. The work moves between whole faces and isolated fragments—a chin, a wrist, a forearm—and the faded motifs surrounding them: pixelated flora, stylized hands, fluid skies. These images once pictured a world of tranquility and harmony, disconnected from the dense city environments in which they are found.
As the sun's gradual erasure fades their gloss, these posters shed their consumerist intent and become strange. At times physical deterioration breaks through—water damage, staining—jolting the images back toward the material world, hinting at something more sinister. The women no longer sell anything; they inhabit a speculative world of power and uncertainty, witnesses and oracles. The work embraces what is uncertain, unresolved, and in motion, qualities that echo our current political, environmental, and technological volatility.
The color blue connects them all, shifting between emotional and symbolic registers: serenity, melancholy, and resilience; digital coolness, the cosmic, and the uncanny. In a statement, Souders writes: "I've been walking by these images my entire life." She began photographing these fading figures across geographies, revisiting them periodically, like checking in on a friend—re-photographing them as a way of attending to a connected world in flux.
Blue Women is printed on uncoated paper, highlighting the painterly qualities Souders' photographs take on. The book's dust jacket unfolds to reveal a full-sized poster, and the book features printed edges.