In this Dark Wood Elisabeth Tonnard Artist Book Photography

Elisabeth Tonnard

In this Dark Wood

This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop 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.

“It’s so rare that a book has a conceptual structure like this with the result being so genuinely affecting.” Charles Gute

Rochester, New York 2008. B&W, perfect bound paperback. 196 pages. See for the slideshow & a review by 5B4 ...

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