Better in the Dark Than His Rider by Francesco Merlini

Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark Than His Rider unravels around the hypnagogic transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep.

Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award 2024
Longlist Photography

PhotoEspana Book Award 2024
Shortlist

Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark than His Rider is both a fable and a survival guide. The collected work by Francesco Merlini spans different years, possibly quite distant from one other; shot in all four continents, his pictures reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, seeks for something nameless. The title is drawn, almost literally, from a 19th century manual of optics. The original sentence – “[…] much better in the dark than his rider” – refers to a horse’s night vision compared to a human’s.

The selected sequence of pictures unravels around the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, engaging with hypnagogia as a sensory yet dreamlike mode of semiconscious representation. Images make up mind’s psychic contents. If in dreams self-consciousness is suspended and images look real to the extent that we are sleeping, when dozing we can consciously guide them because partially aware that we are dreaming. Stated otherwise, in lucid dreams we know we are faced with the contents of our imagination, whose edges appear hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state we do experience both asleep and awake. Thanks to imagination, the dream matter turns into the mind’s real object again.

“Better in the Dark than His Rider by Francesco Merlini is a creative meditation on the sense of sight drawn together from seemingly unrelated images from the artist’s extended archive. There is a visual sumptuousness to this publication which is enhanced by an approach to the sequencing and design, guided by a sensitive, original reading of colour. This is an expertly achieved photobook, conceptually and aesthetically.”
Anthony Luvera
Juror for Kraszna-Krausz Book Award 2024

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Specs:
Text by Luca Reffo
Italian, English
English translation: Marina Calvaresi

23,5x31cm
80 pages
Hardback with embossing on jacket
Black printed page edges
Offset CMYK + UV

Paper:
Munken Lynx Rough 150 g/m²
Fedrigoni Sirio Nero 140 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Slate 120 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Petal 120 g/m²

Printed in Italy by Longo spa
First Edition July 2023
Second Edition October 2023

ISBN 978 88 944622 8 9