In Say Yes, artist Joseph Desler Costa reimagines possibilities of the photobook form within a visually melodic and lyrical meditation on desire and visual seduction. Inspired by the persuasions of mass media and consumer culture, Costa folds commercialism inward while inviting viewers to consider how the aesthetics of visual advertising underlie contemporary life. Costa’s images form a part-critique and part-embrace of such promises, and the artist himself often mimics the slick visual rhetorics of commercial photographs in order not to sell products, but to engage with notions of selfhood, nostalgic fantasy, and the hunger pangs of desire that motivate the modern world. Say Yes defies the traditional photobook format and utilizes physical cut-outs to break holes through pages, subverting the authority of the solitary image and the influence it exerts over the viewer.
