Sonneman, Eve. How to Touch What by Eve Sonneman and Lawrence Weiner.

powerHouse, 2000. First edition.  Like new. Artists’ book, small volume in thick boards with cloth spine. Custom made polyester jacket. Not issued with dust jacket.  Photographs in color of people touching in a variety of situations, with a large word in black on each photo.  Born in 1946, Eve Sonneman is a photographer and artist well known for working in pairs of images. In this book, the facing pages are the pair. She obtained a BFA in painting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1967 and an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 1969. Summary:

How to Touch What is an artist’s book created collaboratively by photographer Eve Sonneman and conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, first published in 2000 by PowerHouse Books.

Rather than a narrative-driven book in the traditional sense, it functions as a visual and textual art piece — a playful marriage of image and language that explores the act of touching, perceiving, and naming.

The book is composed of approximately 50 pairs of photographs and stamped words, presented in a scrapbook-like format. Sonneman’s seemingly straightforward photographs serve as the visual foundation, while Weiner’s rubber-stamp text elements are imprinted directly onto or beside the images.

Together these photo-text pairings create a kind of wordplay and visual dialogue in which ordinary materials, actions, and objects are juxtaposed with language in unexpected ways. The effect prompts readers to look more closely at everyday matter and the way language interacts with physical experience — inviting interpretation, amusement, and repeated viewing.

Rather than explaining a single theme, the book encourages a sensory and conceptual engagement, blurring the boundaries between seeing and reading, and transforming simple images and stamped words into poetic encounters.

Eve Sonneman (b. 1946) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist best known for pioneering the use of photographic diptychs to explore the fleeting passage of time, movement, and narrative sequence. Born in Chicago, she earned her B.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico. Her career gained rapid international prominence following her inclusion in the 1971 Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sonneman became famous for capturing paired images—taken mere seconds or steps apart—that challenge the notion of a single "decisive moment" by inviting viewers to examine subtle shifts in gesture, social interaction, and environmental detail. Transitioning from black-and-white to color sequences in the mid-1970s, her work bridges fine art, cinema, and visual anthropology, earning her a spot at Documenta 6 (1977) as well as the Venice and Paris Biennials. Also an accomplished painter known for pointillist watercolors and abstract canvases, Sonneman has published multiple photobooks—such as Real Time (1976)—and her work is held in major permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou.