Story of David Hartwell and Josef Jacques's 'Library of Evenings' photo exhibit

What did you do -- or see -- last night? San Francisco art students David Hartwell and Josef Jacques can probably answer that.

Their ongoing collaborative project, "Library of Evenings," takes up two shelves at the Arlington Arts Center. On them are several dozen artist's books, neatly held together with binder clips but strewn like well-thumbed magazines in a dentist's waiting room. Each one is marked with an embossed adhesive label identifying the day of the week on which it was made. There were, for example, eight "Mondays" when I stopped by.

Inside each book, you'll find photographs, shot by one of the two artists, but all made after 5 p.m. on a single day. Most -- or at least most of the ones I looked at -- are of a caliber that many wouldn't consider worth saving. A dog, a window, a TV screen. "Deliberately flat-footed" is how Post critic Blake Gopnik described an earlier series of Hartwell's photos.

That description is equally apt about this project, initiated in late August and featuring some 70 finished books. In fact, it could apply to a lot of other work in "Image/Project," too. But the characterization misses the obsessive-compulsive majesty of "Library of Evenings." How is it different from a shoebox full of photo album outtakes? For these artists, there are no outtakes. Like cartographers, Hartwell and Jacques understand that a map isn't about the significance of every little step taken in life, but the larger lay of the land.

-- Michael O'Sullivan