Two unique books in a grey box. Images printed using a heat transfer copier. Both books were made during the artists’ stay as summer teachers at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY.

“In the rooms there was a very old prototype of a photocopier: not even a “box” like machine like we know today, but imagine all the parts of the photocopier being separate on the table! There was a photographic camera mounted on something like an “optical bench”, that allowed to find an exact position; the original had to be pinned on the wall; the “negative” was a plate to be charged in a separate unit first and had to undergo a complicated process for putting the toner onto the plate and transferring it then onto the paper and fixing it.

This “photocopying machine” was very interesting, and we tried to use it — with various results, none of which could be regarded as “perfect”. But we realized that the results had a quality of their own, an atmosphere of painting in various shades of grey. So some of the photocopies we made ended up in these two books.
 
Uta’s book Reading in the dark reflects on the photocopy as such, whereas Ulrike’s Haloid Xerox reflects the process of making. They are, naturally, both one-of-a-kind books: every copy is an original!”
— Ulrike Stolz