The first monograph focused on the work of Elle Pérez, collecting over a decade of deeply personal and visually striking images that imagine a world of love, desire, and vulnerability.
Love, heartache, pleasure, pain—Elle Pérez has emerged as a defining voice of their generation, collecting over the past decade a trove of deeply personal and arresting images of vulnerability’s rawest materials. Pérez makes disarmingly intimate images that portray states of emotional intensity and physical transformation. They started out as a teenager photographing underground spaces, making a tender and vivid record of unalloyed freedom. Since then, their work has ranged from striking portraits of friends and lovers to gladiatorial photographs of wrestlers, crystalline landscapes and still lifes, and sprawling multimedia collages that pull together influences across art and literature. This book presents the artist’s most influential works from 2009 to the present—alongside the ephemera, notes, and research that inform their singular vision—and confirms Pérez’s mastery of the fine balance between document and imagination, perception and performance.
Elle Pérez (born in New York, 1989) is a photographer based in New York. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and MoMA ps1, Public Art Fund, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Pérez was a featured artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale, and they have participated in group exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, London; Brooklyn Museum; and Renaissance Society, Chicago. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. They have taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and the Cooper Union, and they were an artist-in-residence at MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Light Work, and dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from 2016 to 2021. In 2022, Pérez received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Their work has appeared in publications, including Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Elle Pérez: The Movement of Our Bodies, a collection of the artist’s writings, was published in 2025. Pérez is an assistant professor of graduate photography at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Dean Daderko is the Ferring Foundation Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Sylvie McNamara is a staff writer at Washingtonian.
