Firework studies is a 500 copies limited book by Pierre Le Hors, compiling photographs of fireworks in the night sky. By constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. “I made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves,” says Pierre Le Hors.

Fireworkhas been published by Hassla books ($35, ISBN 9780982547151, New York City), an independent publishing company with a focus on art and photography. Hassla specialize in publishing small, low-run artist books that feature the work of both emerging and established artists, always working one-on-one with the artists to create a publication that evokes the very essence of the artist’s focus. This intimate process, coupled with Hassla’s simple aesthetic, allows for an interior view into the artist’s work.