Book excerpt: This career-spanning artist's book presents an alternate history of the photography of New York-based photographer Lucas Blalock (born 1978), featuring new images and previously unseen versions of existing artworks. Employing his signature style of unconcealed digital alterations, including erasures and drawings, and working in both color and black and white, Blalock emphasizes what is absent or obliterated in his manipulated portraits, scenes and still lives, often with a deadpan humor. In A Grocer's Orgy, the artist's layout of such images brings to the forefront the underlying themes, formal connections and art-historical reference points that are often overlooked in the context of his exhibitions.