On the way to get a coffee around the corner from his studio in Lower Manhattan, Michael Stipe catches sight of a piece of paper among the contents of a split-open garbage bag: a child’s school assignment, the large and loping letters suggest. He picks it up. On the way back, the musician and artist pauses again — this time to investigate an unusual fruiting plant growing out of the sidewalk. “My boyfriend tells me I have no hierarchy of image,” Stipe says, back in the studio, referring to his partner, the photographer Thomas Dozol. “I’ll see something and think of it as insanely beautiful, and it might be not at all something that would attract a regular thinking person. And I’ll put it next to something from Versailles — to me, they make sense together.”

It’s this knack for juxtaposition that underlies his new photography book, “Our Interference Times: A Visual Record,” the second volume in a series from the Italian publisher Damiani. While 2018’s “Volume 1” was, he says, “more of a biography, and more like a family portrait,” documenting his years as the frontman of R.E.M. (which he refers to simply as “my band”), in “Our Interference Times,” Stipe, 59, has trained his eye on places where the analog and the digital intersect to form the pattern of the current moment. “This subject is what I was thinking about a lot,” he explains, “this period of time we’re in, and how that’s impacting the way that we view things, the way that we view ourselves.” The images the book comprises — which range from the architectural to the natural, from the studio space to the domestic sphere — are a mixture of photographs Stipe shot digitally, on film and on his phone; many are photos of photos, others have been manipulated beyond recognition. Stipe mediates his vision of the world through both window screens and computer screens in these pages, revealing an undeniable likeness between the fragmenting effects of wire mesh and of a pixelated zoom. One of his favorite progressions opens with a photograph of Paul Nash’s painting “Winter Sea” (1925-37) — a bleak Cubist rendering of the English Channel — then turns to Stipe’s photographs of whales surfacing off the coast of Baja California along with snapshots of a resort’s digital signage. Through the grouping of these disparate images, a surprising and uneasy resemblance emerges.

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