FROOM OUR BOOKSHELF
“One Is Not Enough” by Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller
Among the most urgent and discomforting books on our shelf, One Is Not Enough does not simply gather images, it unfolds as an embodied theory of photography as a serial act, as repeated exposure, as a radical form of resistance. Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller, artist, photographer, filmmaker, and psychoanalyst, questions the illusion of singularity from the title onward. One shot isn’t enough. One pose isn’t enough. One version of the self isn’t enough. Nothing here attempts to be definitive.
The book spans over forty years of visual practice, where photography and film are treated not as separate media, but as part of a cohesive and uncompromising project. The body, often her own, returns again and again, day after day, frame after frame, not as a resolved subject but as a site of process, tension, and refusal. Each image is just one variation, one micro-shift. And it’s precisely in that obsessive, methodical repetition that meaning begins to take shape.
Kubelka vom Gröller photographs the way one performs a ritual: with rigor, discipline, duration.
Her daily self-portraits (produced over years according to precise serial structures) are not stylistic exercises, nor narcissistic. They are a dismantling of fixed identity: the self dissolves in time, reveals its contradictions, resists closure and yet persists. This is not a search for the exceptional, but for accumulation as a form of disordered, lived truth.
In this sense, One Is Not Enough is also a book about temporality. Not time as nostalgia, but as material. Photography here does not preserve. It erodes, sediments, unsettles. Kubelka vom Gröller isn’t trying to produce “good images,” but rather a visual space of endurance , an extended field in which presence becomes possible through insistence.
In many of the series collected in the book – portraits of herself, her mother, strangers invited into her studio – the pose becomes a battleground between control and surrender. Who is watching? Who is showing themselves? How performative is every look directed at a camera, and how much unspoken weight can still remain within repetition?
This book, published by Éditions Xavier Barral and accompanied by powerful essays (including Ute Eskildsen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau), presents Kubelka vom Gröller’s work not as a retrospective, but as a device. A system for disarming codified visual language. A method, not a monument. We keep this book in the studio because it forces us to confront the foundations of contemporary image-making: singularity, recognizability, clarity, speed. At a time when everything is made to be instantly visual and shareable, One Is Not Enough chooses ambiguity, process, and duration.
We recommend it not because it’s easy to like, but because it refuses resolution. It doesn’t aim to seduce, but to disturb. It reminds us that identity is not something to display, but something to dismantle and rebuild, piece by piece, every day.
It’s a work less about style, and more about the threshold. And in the studio, we open it whenever we need to remember: one image is never enough. It never was.
