How we designed this fall’s seasonal catalog, featuring Rebekah Rutkoff’s Double Vision
Each year the MIT Press issues seasonal catalogs featuring the books and projects we are excited to publish in the coming months. For the fall 2024 season, the cover of our catalog highlights Rebekah Rutkoff’s August 2024 book, Double Vision—a lavishly illustrated inside account of filmmaker Robert Beavers, one of avant-garde film’s most original outsiders.
For Debbie Kuan, copywriting manager at the MIT Press, deciding what image will grace the cover of our catalogs is never easy. “Rather than try to find an image that telegraphs the themes of the books in the season, I usually try to find an image from one of the books that resonates with our brand, which is cutting-edge and experimental, provocative and forward-thinking,” Kuan said. “We usually turn to the art, architecture, and design books for ideas, but sometimes it’s science or something else.”
This fall, Double Vision was an immediate standout as a catalog cover contender. “I loved the Robert Beavers image right away, because it’s haunting and evocative,” Kuan said. The image—from Beaver’s 1980 film AMOR—depicts the filmmaker from the neck-down wearing a three-piece suit, standing in an outdoor theater in Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens with his arms held stiffly away from his body.
“Beavers shot the image with his lens askew on his Bolex camera—one of his signature moves—thus partially blocking the aperture and producing the black arc that tops the image,” said Rutkoff, the author of Double Vision. “The mysterious co-presence of multiple varieties of seeing suggested by the image makes it a provocative introduction to Beavers’s cinema.”
While the cover image might act as an entrypoint to Beaver’s work, Double Vision as a whole dives much deeper. Victoria Hindley, the Press’s senior acquisitions editor in art, architecture, and design, considers Rutkoff’s study to be “meticulous” and “singular.” “Double Vision is an exemplary model of how to write about film presented in a carefully crafted and lavishly illustrated book,” she said. “Here, Rutkoff—the only writer with full access to the Beavers archive—elevates film’s literary canon while offering the definitive work of a deeply original underground figure and one of today’s greatest living avant garde filmmakers.”
Although Kuan doesn’t typically select a cover image for our catalogs with the intention of making a statement about the world at large, she considers the image from Double Vision to be a perfect encapsulation of the mood of our fraught times.
“There’s peril in the headless man, but there’s also possibility,” Kuan said. “Without a face and a head, he seems to suggest a new way of thinking about ourselves vis-à-vis the world, one that is perhaps not so ego-driven or Anthropocentric. After all, isn’t it mankind’s ego that landed us in the planetary and geopolitical disasters in which we now find ourselves?”