genesislauu@gmail.com
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there are currently 978 books in the library
as of january 2025 the library is made up of my personal research and collection of books that live in my small home library in istanbul, the UK and in storage (for now) in the US.
the term Guerrilla Exegesis
comes from the 1995 essay, “Guerrilla Exegesis: "Struggle" as a Scholarly Vocation - A Post-modern Approach to African-American Biblical Interpretation” by Obery M. Hendricks Jr. for so much of western history, the christian church functioned as the top record keepers - employing first scribes and then other types of writers, and then artists to tell society who it was and what the world was like and how it came to be.
eventually, lay writers and then photographers took over from painters - and now we look to both of these arenas in contemporary society in different forms to tell us who we are and what the world is like. i’m interested in this question of who actually gets to perform this role, and how photographers and authors are frequently given a sort of “neutral” status as the record keepers of humanity. my own work attempts to put myself in these positions of “neutrality” by revisiting some common tropes in american and european photography and literature - like the idea of the american road trip or “the great american novel”.
while this library is by no means a religious project (unless you count the devotional labor of dragging hundreds of books all around the world a religious project) a lot of the books in the library reflect my personal interest in the historical and ethical boundaries around religious storytelling in both visual and written form. i also come back a lot to the idea of religious institutions as “the” grand storytellers, so there are a lot of references to religious history and religious mythology in both the library, and my work.
ultimately, this is a knowledge project (more on that below), and my own approach to understanding, creating and sharing knowledge.
the painting on the homepage is by Howard Finster
"Words of Jesus Only” / 1981 / paint on reverse side of cut-out interior plywood paneling You can find more of his work in this blog post, in the 2013 exhibition catalogue, “Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection” and many, many other books.
the primary purpose of the project is to share knowledge with myself and everyone else.
“Any claims I make to knowledge percolate through a mass.”the question of how to turn a personal library/research web into a collective experience of knowledge sharing is one that i’ve wrestled with since “back then” or way back when. ultimately, it’s a question of access, and not just access to the physical books themselves, but also the pages within.
“All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission.”
a library is a Knowledge Project, something also obsessing me for decades;
“forming layers of your own illusory Knowledge Project, where finally you become an Observer and it is only your job to make observations / Susan Sontag wrote, “To photograph ... means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and therefore, like power.”” — one could just as easily say this about writers; and thus my obsession with “the Photographer and the Author as “neutral figures”—ethnographically objective purveyors of knowledge about people and places.”
i have no more answers now than i did back then, but i’d like to start somewhere, and this, here is somewhere.