STOP onestar press is a poetic visual documentation of the paper manufacturing industry. Divided into three chapters, the book opens with 48 portraits of trees, then documents the fate of these trees as they are cut, piled, hauled and finally pulped in giant factories. The book concludes with an inventory of disposable paper products: bundled paper, cardboard boxes, newspapers, paper cups, paper bags, and, in a self-critiquing gesture, the pages of the book itself. STOP onestar press draws attention to the physical history of the paper bound into each copy of the book, and points to the viewer’s complicity in the consumer-driven manufacturing process. Awareness of this complicity, normally suppressed during any reading experience, is the book’s subtext. Steiner’s perspective is both broad and introspective, and the stark yet lyrical images in STOP onestar press are a powerful reminder of the massive environmental destruction that sustains our consumer culture.

A.L. Steiner is a photographer whose work is published and exhibited internationally, and is featured in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts.

Photos and layout: A. L. Steiner