With Residual Bodies, Forma Editions experiments with vintage imagery and the tactile feel of print on paper. It revisits an interest explored in 2016 when the press launched its first project, Not For Sale to Minors, a large-format newsprint series that reimagined gay porn imagery by removing its explicit elements. Through three issues, that early work focused on the tension between erotic representation, censorship, and the materiality of print. It suggested that queer desire is not only articulated through what is shown, but also through what is obscured, cropped, or withheld, an exploration of absence.

In Residual Bodies, this exploration continues, but with a shift. The publication engages intuitively with these images as material objects in their own right. The halftone screens, misaligned colour plates, soft, cheap paper, ink bleeds, and fading reproductions become central. Bodies and other subjects dissolve into texture, and suggestive forms transform into surfaces marked by technical imperfections. Crops and enlargements abstract these fragments, creating spaces where the erotic remains visible but continually destabilised, while overlooked details are selected, scanned, enlarged, elevated, turning what was once secondary into primary focus. 

The imperfections of the sourced images remain, testifying to a history of circulation: once-clandestine prints passed hand to hand, hidden in drawers, sold cheaply, and produced quickly. Then, circulation mattered more than print quality and the fragility of the object was inseparable from the vulnerability of the culture it represented. 

By reframing these materials, the publication becomes a visual essay on queer print textures. It is less concerned with representing desire directly than with exploring desire as residue. Traces embedded in the material, rhythms carried by the sequencing, intimacy in the grain, and fragments of the body that persist, grounding the work in erotic charge. What emerges is a sense that print failures, distortions, and accidents are not flaws, but traces of beauty found in the imperfections.