Many people have trouble with the work of Winnipeg photographer Diana Thorneycroft. While her staged black-and-white portraits may be gorgeously rich in texture and composition, every one of them confronts our moral and ethical senses with images of bondage, pain, submission, violence, eroticism, and death. Diana Thorneycroft: The Body, Its Lesson and Camouflage is a slick presentation of the photographer’s work over the past decade or so, beautifully packaged with 40 plates bound in a black matte cover.

Editor Meeka Walsh has also compiled three essays (one of them written by herself) that put Thorneycroft’s work into artistic and philosophical contexts. But the book’s best read is a fourth piece, Robert Enright’s interview with the photographer. Despite Enright’s rigorous questioning as to how she interprets her own work and its transgressional edges, Thorneycroft diligently refuses to give in to pop psychology. Her images, she says, are not guided by symbolism or past trauma. If not, what then? Thorneycroft leaves it up to us to discover how far our own curiosity will lead us in search of meaning.