In this Dark Wood

  • Dates
    2008 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Topics Archive
  • Location Rochester, United States

In this Dark Wood is an artist book functioning as a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno.

In this Dark Wood is an artist book functioning as a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s. The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.

Two versions of the book exist, a self-published artist edition that was released in Rochester, NY in 2008 and a trade edition that was published by J&L Books in 2013. The book measures 6 x 9 inches and contains 196 pages with 90 image-text combinations.

The book received an award in the Fine Art category of the 2010 Photography Book Now Competition and won the runner-up award in the Maribor photobook award 2018.

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