I was looking for a biography and ended up in something else entirely.

It was Autobiography by Sol LeWitt, first published in 1980.

Page after page of black-and-white photographs arranged in a strict grid.
Objects, walls, fragments of a life reduced to structure.

An autobiography, in title only.

He never once appears.

It is hard not to think of Instagram.
The same grid. The same accumulation.

The comparison feels almost too easy.

Because the structure is the same.
The intention is not.

LeWitt removes himself completely.
What remains is a system.

Now, the same language is used to do the opposite.
To be present. To be seen.

What was once deliberate returns as something continuous, almost unconscious.

And there is something reassuring in that.

That a medium like the book continues to carry these experiments, shaped over centuries.
Ways of arranging images and text, long before they become familiar.

Or perhaps before we notice them again.