Living High, Letting Die is an image-based project set in Mies van der Rohe's Social Service Administration Library in Chicago's Hyde Park. Through large-format photographs and a short film, the project tracks an impossible camera position as it circumnavigates the space. Following the visual logic of the grid, the camera intersects the libraries' holdings, volumes bound together under the premise of social service. While the architecture orients an iconic atmosphere, a language of illness pervades the library catalog. This apparent ambivalence becomes the ground for a fragmented text, excerpted from the library stacks. Through photographic stillness, levitation, and a text repurposed from books whose titles imply relevance for both the clinical and optical realm, Living High, Letting Die shapes a slow meditation on oblique fantasies underlying objective vernacular, be it photographic, architectural, or clinical.

Adam Schreiber is an artist based in Chicago and Austin. His work explores contingencies of photographic objectivity in relation to archives. Recent exhibitions include Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive (2013), a collaborative curatorial project (with the artist collective, Lakes Were Rivers) at the Ransom Center for the Humanities; Flanagan-Tiravanija (2012) at the Pace Foundation; and Diminishing Return (2011) at Artpace San Antonio. He is currently assistant professor in the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University.