In This Dark Wood
In This Dark Wood is an artist book functioning as a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone at night in city streets with 90 different English translations 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, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s through the 1970s. 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 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.
