Power, it’s been said, has been a central theme of Clegg & Guttmann’s portrait photography since the 1980s. The titles or captions of some works openly catalogue the professional stature of their subjects, and symbols of wealth and position abound: power suits, power ties, strings of pearls, bourgeois coiffures. Some of the subjects, in fact, commissioned their portraits. The images, too, as time has come to show, possess a palpable iconic status and historical relevance not unrelated to power.

First gaining attention in New York and then in the German-speaking art world, where Clegg & Guttmann

How to write about Henri Chopin? How to do justice to an artist who devoted himself to the purification of language? How to honor beautiful, brilliant works when the artist would have rejected such attributes because of their philosophical implications and when the vocabulary used to describe a “pure” practice is per se contaminated, trailing so much philosophical and ideological baggage behind it? When deconstructing language by means of language is like fighting fire with fire? Chopin (1922–2008) set out to deconstruct language as we know it, fusing sense and nonsense and transforming words