asmr4

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ASMR4, Vol. 13 – East Village Collages 1982-1999, photographs by Martin Wong is now published.

ASMR4 is a small run publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes of this project served as both conversation and message. The subsequent four focused on the strange and forgotten. The next series centered on the obsessive and anachronistic. Vol. 13 is its own issue, yet its images reflect on the dozen volumes so far.

I sometimes step on ruins whose redness is toned down by the dust, and they are so delicate, discreet and fragrant with humility that I have the impression I am placing the sole of my shoe on Jean’s face. I had met him four years before in August 1940. He was sixteen at the time. — Jean Genet Funeral Rites

Not unlike Genet, Martin Wong trips unabashedly through a landscape of desire glorifying that which normally gets passed over. Like old buildings fallen into ruin, dirty cell block walls or a crumpled fireman’s coat. — Adam Putnam 2009

where to buy:

ASMR4 v.5-13 are available for individual purchase. Or v.5-8 and v.9-12 are available as sets. All via https://asmr4.square.site/.

PANEL AND BOOK EVENT Tuesday, June 24, 2025 5-7pm at PPOW, 392 Broadway, NYC

For the launch of the latest volume co-editors Adam Putnam and Katie Murray will speak about Martin Wong and the ASMR4 project.

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ASMR4, Vol. 12 – The Ocean Will Have Us is now published.

ASMR4 is a small run publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes of this project served as both conversation and message. The subsequent four focused on the strange and forgotten archives of Alfred Cook, Patricia McCormick, Hudson’s Bay Company and Alice Austen. The new series centers around the obsessive and anachronistic and features photographs made as if by accident - volcanic eruptions, animals anonymously caught on camera, archival slides from Howard Beach and documents of DIY shelters and artificial oceans.

Steve Badgett builds makeshift structures in order to exist on the edge of what would be considered habitable landscapes. There is a floating platform. Another rests near a vanished lake. Among these are stills from my digital Ocean. I worked on it in the early 2000's. It's another peripheral space, carried around on my desktop computer in the backseat of my car. — Dan Torop

where to buy:

ASMR4 v.5-12 are available for individual purchase. Or v.5-8 and v.9-12 are available as sets. All via https://asmr4.square.site/.

PANEL AND BOOK EVENT Friday, April 12, 2024 6-8pm at Soft Network, 636 Broadway, Room 312, NYC

For the launch of the latest volume. co-editors Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam will be in conversation about the project accompanied by a selection of archival films.

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ASMR4, Vol. 11 – Made in U.S.A. is now published.

ASMR4 is a small run, quarterly publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes of this project served as both conversation and message. The subsequent four focused on the strange and forgotten. ASMR4 Vol. 11 is the third in the current series, which fixates on the obsessive and anachronistic.

Kodachrome-Kodak’s twice improved answer to Americans’ insatiable appetite to catalogue every major event of one’s life: weddings, birthdays, proms, graduations, holidays, vacations, etc. As Paul Simon sang in 1973 “…makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah.” It makes me wonder, was it the film or was it the life? Either way, a long-forgotten box of my family’s “sunny days” untethered from actual memories, and the people who made them, becomes a pathway to something new. — Katie Murray

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ASMR4, Vol. 10 – Trailcam Photographs by Bill & Tony is now published.

ASMR4 is a small run, quarterly publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes of this project served as both conversation and message. The subsequent four focused on the strange and forgotten. ASMR4 Vol. 10 is the second in the current series, which fixates on the obsessive and anachronistic.

Trailcam Photographs are photographs of survival.

Pilot Peak was a landmark for the Donner Party on the emigrant trail. In September 1846, they abandoned their wagons and oxen to reach Pilot Springs at the foot of Pilot Peak after a treacherous journey across the Great Salt Lake Desert, unaware of their destiny that lay ahead.

Near Pilot Peak, in the remote mountains of northeast Nevada, sits another testimony to survival. In this parched desert landscape, which receives an average of 8.27 inches of rain per year, there is a trough where animals flock to satiate their thirst.

— Vicky Sambunaris

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ASMR4, Vol. 9 – Field Work: Photographs by Ilana Halperin is now published.

Please join us for a launch of Field Work Saturday Dec 3, 2022, 4-6pm PPOW 390 Broadway, NYC, 2nd Floor 

ASMR4 is a small run, quarterly publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes of this project served as both conversation and message. The subsequent four focused on the strange and forgotten. ASMR4 Vol. 9, inaugurates a new series fixating on the obsessive and anachronistic.

Ilana Halperin’s Field Work is a brief but comprehensive look at the artist’s collection of photographs shot over the course of 20 years and across several continents. Following her own obsession with the formation of new landmass, these photos, shot with a Holga, document the various kinds of eruptions encountered by the artist on her travels. However, seeing them all together for the first time, I would say that it is the photos themselves that are erupting… as if the small plastic camera could barely contain what it saw.

— Adam Putnam

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ASMR4, Vol. 8 -- Clear Comfort: Photographs from the Alice Austen Archive is now published.

On June 5, 2022 at 1pm, please join us for a panel and book signing at the Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island.

ASMR4 is a small run publication co-edited by Katie Murray,  Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The first four volumes  served as both conversation and message. The current series focuses on  the strange and forgotten. The latest issue v.8, Clear Comfort, concludes this series.

Clear Comfort,  Alice Austen’s family home, held within its boundaries all of the complications that a home can represent. At best, a home can be a catalyst for creativity and exploration. At worst it can prohibit, interfere, inhibit. Recognizing that, Austen turned her camera towards her home and the people with whom she shared her life.

— Katie Murray

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After a somewhat housebound hiatus, we have ASMR4, Vol. 8: Clear Comfort in production, and anticipate that it will be available in November 2020.

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Please join us for the release of ASMR4, Vol. 7 – Icebergs Friday, January 10, 2020, 6-8pm The Penumbra Foundation (36 E 30th Street, New York, NY)

ASMR4 is a small run publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. The latest issue is v.7, Icebergs: floating chunks of rock and snow; from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives and the Ralph Stockman Tarr expeditions.

In 1997, I had a scheme. I would travel north.  There would be  no hurry. From New England into Canada, toward upper Quebec and the Hudson Bay. I would stop at rural airstrips and mosquito-ridden streams. It would take months, even years, to make my way north. I thought that there would always be a chill and sparsely peopled north into which to journey.

This journey never happened, but images have accumulated.

— Dan Torop

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Please join us for the release of ASMR4, Vol. 6 – Del Rio: Photographs and Film Stills from the life of legendary Matadora Patricia McCormick 1929-2013 Thursday, April 18, 2019, 6-8pm The Penumbra Foundation (36 E 30th Street, New York, NY)

Vol. 6 presents archival images and film stills from the life of the legendary matadora Patricia McCormick (1929-2013, bullfighter 1951-62).

She had shunned an art career to become the Lady Bullfighter, a defiant and extraordinary path, particularly for a woman at that time. McCormick would later write, “I could keep this up all day! I am in no hurry to kill, you lovely, brave beast. But I must, before you learn how to kill me. I know you will die at the height of your courage, trying to fathom the illusive cloth that you can’t get your horns into, searching for the real enemy you would destroy.”

                                                                             — Victoria Sambunaris

ASMR4 v.6, Del Rio, as well as all previous volumes, will be on sale at the Petzel booth at the 2019 LA Art Book Fair (April 11-14).

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Ghost Image

Jennifer Krasinski interviewed Adam Putnam for Artforum. They spoke about Alfred Cook and ASMR4. Here is the interview.

Nearly twenty years ago, artist Adam Putnam came across the photographs of Alfred Cook in the archives of the Frick Collection. Recently, he edited together a selection of Cook’s images for ASMR4, a publishing project Putnam launched in collaboration with fellow artists Dan Torop, Victoria Sambunaris, and Katie Murray. Here, Putnam and Jennifer Krasinski discuss the mysterious Cook, and why these photographs have haunted him for so long.

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Please join us for the release of ASMR4, Vol. 5 – Alfred Cook: Archival Photographs from The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library – Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018, 6-8pm The Penumbra Foundation, 36 E 30th Street, New York, NY

ASMR4 is a small run, quarterly publication co-edited by Katie Murray, Victoria Sambunaris, Dan Torop, and Adam Putnam. While the first 4 volumes served as both conversation and message, the upcoming series will focus on the strange and forgotten. 

Twenty years ago, while working as a book conservator at the Frick Art Reference Library, I was given the job of cleaning and preserving a series of photo albums, artifacts from when the Frick residence was being rebuilt as a library and museum. The albums contained original photographs taken by Alfred Cook, a footman to the Frick family. His images reveal a lexicon of strange and curious subjects: dark hallways, empty rooms, and most notably, light fixtures. The images reproduced in this book were made between 1933 and 1935.                                                                                   — Adam Putnam

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ASMR4 is pleased to announce the release of its fourth volume, Ordinary Matter, by photographer Katie Murray. The title Ordinary Matter, scientifically speaking, alludes to all that is seen and knowable. Making use of visual alliteration and an aesthetic rhythm the work in this volume considers the mysterious nature of familiarity. Murray’s collection of images exist somewhere between the mythic and the mundane, reflecting a reality that is both rooted in and removed from our own.

Please join us to celebrate ASMR4 v.4 at Spoonbill Studios (99 Montrose Ave., Brooklyn) on September 13, 2018, 7-9PM.

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The third ASMR4 volume features new images by Dan Torop from his project Lone Garden, Lone Lake. Dust, weeds and other castaways make up the universe of Dan Torop’s recent work. For the past year, Torop has been photographing the back garden of Spoonbill Studios. While documenting seasonal changes in the slow shift of light and foliage, he has been thinking about weeds: fast-growing, fast-seeding plants that thrive in bad soil and outpace all efforts at cultivation. Alongside the garden are images of Owens Lake in California — nearly gone — drained by a Los Angeles aqueduct. What remains is perhaps the largest source of dust pollution in the country, in a valley from which so much has been displaced.

ASMR4 is a small-run conversation. A conversation between four photographers in the form of a book. Sixteen-page signatures.

Please join us for the release of ASMR4 v.3 at Spoonbill Studio (99 Montrose Ave., Brooklyn) on June 14, 2018, 7-9PM.

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The second ASMR4 volume features a selection of images by Victoria Sambunaris from her project Trafficking. The work addresses the petrochemical and industrial cargo trades and the effect they have on marine habitats. Sambunaris is a project-based photographer who organizes her life around annual road trips across the American West, equipped with nothing but a 5x7 wooden field camera, camping gear, and a few months supply of canned sardines and crackers. The large-scale photos of the contemporary American landscape tell a conflicted story in geographic, economic and cultural terms. The current work stems from Sambunaris’ invitation to the Galveston Artist Residency and her collaboration with National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration marine biologist Kristopher Benson in 2015. The collaboration allows a more comprehensive scientific perspective and alludes to the expansion of global markets and the intensification of consumption worldwide.

Please join us for the release of ASMR4 v.2 at Spoonbill Studio (99 Montrose Ave., Brooklyn) on January 25, 2018, 7-9PM.

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The first volume of ASMR4 is a sequence taken from Adam Putnam’s film project Reclaimed Empire (Deep Edit) 2008-2016, an ongoing series comprised of over 80 fragments and short video works. The title, initially an overt nod to Warhol’s Empire, speaks less about homage, and more to the notion of a constant return to repeated subject matter - a gaze that never leaves, that stares un-blinkingly – mechanically - at the same subject. “This was my Empire, comprised of whatever was on hand in my studio, sculptural fragments, broken mirrors, architectural models and other detritus…”

Please join us for the release of ASMR4 v.1 at Spoonbill Studio (99 Montrose Ave., Brooklyn) on September 10, 2017 at 7PM.

ASMR4 is an experiment co-edited by Katie Murray, Adam Putnam, Vicky Sambunaris and Dan Torop.