100 Boots Taking the Hill (1 – 5), Lomas Santa Fe, California, June 13, 1972

4 1/2 x 7 inches each
(11.4 x 17.8 cm each)
(Inventory #22004)

100 Boots is Antin’s best-known conceptual work, consisting of 51 postcards that were mailed to hundreds of recipients around the world from 1971-1973. It documents the boots in a photo diary of sorts where the images acted as movie stills, each one part of a long narrative, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and ending in New York City, where their journey was presented in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Somehow it came to me in a dream. There! Black boots! Big black boots. I got them at the Army-Navy Surplus then I printed them up on postcards. Over the course of it—finally two and a half years—fifty-one cards were mailed out to about a thousand people around the world. Now it is a piece that I see as a kind of pictorial novel that was sent through the mail, came unannounced, unasked for. It came in the middle of people’s lives.”
— Eleanor Antin