Pastor, Suzanne

Suzanne Pastor was introduced to bookmaking while she was creating exhibition and sales catalogues for a photography gallery in Cologne, Germany, and she became fascinated with the artistic potential of sequencing and overlapping images. In the early 1980s, she began making her own books. Soon after, she started creating sculptural books made of glass, incorporating photographic elements. Pastor has stated, "I make sculptural glass books because they are transparent objects, able to encompass the layering of memories in fragmented images and texts, as life seems to do with time, as in chapters of a book we are living."

Duel with Ourselves, a 9 x 10 inch glass book presented on a marble base, is part of a larger series of works commenting on our relationship with art. The piece combines a torn fragment from a late nineteenth century albumen print and a text by artist Jochen Gerz, translated from German into English, which Pastor typed on an electric typewriter and photocopied onto mylar sheets, before cutting it into smaller pages.

Born in Chicago, Pastor completed a BA at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (1975). She went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1976-78) and at Kassel University, Germany (1981-85). From 1985 to 1990, Pastor worked as an artist in Cologne, Germany. She moved to Prague in 1990, and in the following year, she co-founded the Prague House of Photography.