Profane Waste: Essay by Gretchen Rubin and Photographs by Dana Hoey

Jewels buried in a grave, cigarettes smoked in $100 bills, champagne poured into a bathtub — what explains these seemingly perverse and irrational, yet also thrilling, acts? The illuminating Profane Waste explores the workings of an unacknowledged taboo: the taboo against willful dissipation, profane waste.

Profane Waste is the product of an extraordinary collaboration. Dana Hoey, an acclaimed photographer, presents a series of haunting images that are at once ultra-real and uncanny. Noted writer Gretchen Rubin uses lucid analysis and explosive examples — actions by Rauschenberg, Jesus, Ivan Boesky, Thoreau, Goebbels and others — to demonstrate the power of profane waste. Published together, Hoey's 30 photographs and Rubin's provocative argument give the reader a shock of recognition as a category of action — never before explained — becomes comprehensible.

Profane Waste is that rare book where the artist and the writer not only mutually reinforce each other, but create something together that only the combination of the art and the writing can achieve. As Rubin writes, "My writings had frustrated me because even when I felt I'd captured my concept of profane waste, mere words couldn't manage to shock, to dazzle the reader in a single moment. The density and immediacy of Dana's photographs, however, could capture the explosiveness of profane waste as words alone could not."

Dana Hoey has a B.A. in philosophy from Wesleyan and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale. She has exhibited in galleries and museums in New York and Europe, including a solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Her work is represented by the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and she teaches in the interdisciplinary M.F.A. Program at Columbia University.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of Forty Ways to Look at JFK (2005), Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill (2003) and Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide (2000). Rubin received her undergraduate and law degrees from Yale and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and served as a chief adviser to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. For many years, she taught a seminar at Yale Law School and Yale School of Management. Her website is www.gretchenrubin.com.