"All the pictures were made with a Nikon instamatic."

The photographs in this book were taken between 1980 and 1990 either in David Salle's studio or in his home.
In some of them the more generous space of the studio and such props as the canvases stacked against the wall make the location obvious. The greater number, taken in what may well be read as a fifties or sixties motel room, reveal the artist's penchant for the decorative arts of the period, the plain wood tables, Noguchi lamp and vase of flowers that are the cosen furnishings of his home. It is this collective memory of an earlier time that helps create the uneasy intimacy and stripped down anonymity of the primal setting all these women inhabit.

I asked David to take the time to note down the various cameras and f-stops he used, to provide a technical note for photographically literate. He laughed and said, "All the pictures were made with a Nikon instamatic."

The raw, assertive sexuality in these photographs on first view can shock. On subsequent viewings the shock recedes an we are left to contemplate genuine tenderness and stunning formal invention.

And then, another day, we feel the shock again.