ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO PEOPLE is an artist book about history and circumstance.
Mining over a century of photographs, Lee’s book utilizes images of our modern era’s most iconic and eclectic public figures. Actors, authors, politicians, athletes, scientists, artists, musicians, designers, and religious leaders—from Mark Twain to John McEnroe, Jay-Z to Mother Teresa—are featured, a pair per page, in an un-broken chain of chance encounters, official meetings, and friendly snapshots.
In a carousel loop of 162 pairings, the book begins and ends with Andy Warhol, who is first seen standing with Muhammad Ali, then on the final page of the book with hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. Every new page contains an individual from the preceding page matched up with a new partner, forming a continuing sequence of prominent individuals meeting their seemingly random counterparts. Like Lee’s performative practice that imagines conversations between disparate cultural figures, the photographs proceed with both major and minor shifts in place and time, accumulating in an imaginative meditation on how distinct individuals might combine as part of a larger discourse. - Bywater Bros. Editions