Cara Barer

Cara Barer (b. Houston, Texas) is a fine art photographer whose work centers on the transformation of the printed book. Trained in photography in Houston, she began altering books in 2004 after finding a rain-ruined telephone directory outside her studio — an accident that became a practice.

Her sculptures begin with volumes already obsolete: encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, and directories rescued from resale shops and recycling bins. Submerged in water, reshaped by hand, and dyed, each book is photographed once and then often dismantled, leaving the photograph as the only permanent record of the form.

Barer's work has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, and is held in private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.

We are living through the moment when the book stops being primarily a tool and becomes primarily an object. My work looks at that threshold directly. I am not interested in mourning the printed page so much as in watching it change state.

Water is my first material. It loosens the paper, returns it to something nearly organic, and lets me coax forms that recall shells, flowers, and weather. What I photograph is not destruction but metamorphosis — knowledge that has changed shape rather than vanished.