Artist''s book by Philip Zimmermann featuring photographs and text on die-cut star shaped and rectangular pages. Published in conjunction with Montage ''93, International Festival of the Image. "My work is often about personal events or psychological states in my life. In the late eighties and early nineties I felt caught in a very stressful life of juggling a very demanding job (two actually), two small kids, a marriage, plus trying to find time to do creative personal art work, and a million other things. This seems to be a situation that so many artists are living, probably always have been and always will. I am not someone who responds well to stress necessarily, yet seem addicted to it and require it to get stuff done. I knew there were high costs and repercussions so I started to do research on stress on humans. I wanted to create a book that investigated stress and perhaps even looked into ways or relieving it, I hoped in a universal way that many people could relate to. The first dummies had a slightly different shape and had an exploding bomb on the cover; this was eventually changed to my exploding head.

The book goes through a clinical reciting of dozens of symptoms of stress on humans. The second part describes slightly tongue-in-cheek solutions to getting rid of stress in one''s life. I do think I hit a nerve with this book. I don''t know how many times that I have had people come up to me or email me and say that the book perfectly describes their life and that it really spoke to them. I had a psychologist order three copies and she told me that she kept one on a little table in her waiting room!" -- artist''s statement.