I Also Fight Windmills Photobook
Artist photobook, 2003
I Also Fight Windmills recovers the life and work of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872–1925), a trilingual modernist writer long relegated to a footnote in the history of her partner, sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Through staged photography made in dialogue with Sophie’s writing, Ready re-enters this overlooked history and the psychological world of her texts.
Denied a university education by parents who wanted her married off, Sophie instead worked as a nanny, teacher and domestic worker across Paris, Philadelphia, New York and London, writing in Polish, French and English wherever she went. Henri's death in the First World War compounded a life already shaped by poverty and the precarious status of the unmarried migrant woman. She died in a psychiatric asylum in Gloucester in 1925, largely forgotten.
Ready's photographs do not illustrate this history, they enact it. Working from Gaudier-Brzeska's novel Hysterical Women, Ready stages and performs the mental states of its heroines: young women undone by lives of drudgery, their hysteria read as a form of bodily protest. The images are Ready's own re-enactments, built through four years of archival research across Europe and the US, and they stand as a parallel narrative to the writing.
The book's design carries the same logic. Gaudier-Brzeska's texts are printed on smaller yellow pages, tipped into the main body - a reference to the Polish idiom mieć żółte papiery, "to have yellow papers," meaning to have been committed to an asylum. Typography shifts with her psychological state, at points running upside down or crowding to the edge of the page.
The book's design carries the same logic. Gaudier-Brzeska's texts are printed on smaller yellow pages, tipped into the main body - a reference to the Polish idiom mieć żółte papiery, "to have yellow papers," meaning to have been committed to an asylum. Typography shifts with her psychological state, at points running upside down or crowding to the edge of the page.
Artist Photobook
2023
VIKA Books
160 pages, hardcover, foil-blocked, tipped-in
17.5 × 22.7 cm
ISBN 9780957025592
Signed and numbered edition of 300
Selected Presentations
The Photographers' Gallery, London - book launch/conversation with Christiane Monarchi
FORMAT Festival
Photo Oxford
Pushkin House, London
Dublin Art Book Fair
Book on Photography (BOP), Bristol
Bound Art Book Fair, Manchester
Shutterhub Book & Zine Fair, Cambridge
Held in Collections
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
National Galleries of Scotland
Martin Parr Foundation
Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex
Birmingham University Library
Salford University
Wotton-under-Edge Heritage Centre
Hundred Heroines Museum
Women and the Photobook initiative
NOMUS New Art Museum, Poland
Aperture Library, New York
Arles Photobook Library, France
SWERVE Magazine Art Book Collection, Ireland
Private collections in the UK, Ireland, USA, Poland and New Zealand
Selected Responses
"A beautiful book! I love the format, layout and how text and image go side by side."
Dr. Ileana L. Selejan, lecturer in Art History, Culture and Society, University of Edinburgh
"A beautifully produced book."
Martin Parr, photographer"A remarkable piece of art, giving voice to a forgotten silenced female creative of the past."
Natasha Caruana, artist
Further reading
On Melancholy, Madness and Dream — Karolina Słup, Contemporary Lynx
Creative Transformation — Marianna Leszczyk, University of Oxford
Recovering the Forgotten Archive — Etain O'Carroll, Photo Oxford
On Melancholy, Madness and Dream — Contemporary Lynx
Related Publication
Ready is also editor and co-translator of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska: An Anthology (Kettle's Yard, 2025).
Photography Credits
All photographs: Ania Ready
