A Modern Gothic Dante's Inferno In this Dark Wood Artists Book How We See Elisabeth Tonnard Photography

In this Dark Wood
Tonnard, Elisabeth
Published by Elisabeth Tonnard, Rochester, New York, U.S.A., 2008

This is a copy of the original first edition of In this Dark Wood, published by the artist during her stay in Rochester, 2008. Below you'll find a text on this wonderful book. The gallery represents the artist's work, including the limited editions of One Swimming Pool, Interior Monologue and The Man of the Crowd. "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 my book 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." (text by Elisabeth Tonnard).

How We See: Photobooks by Women, 10×10 Photobooks’ latest project and publication presents a global range of 21st-century photobooks by female photographers.

With historical records establishing 19th-century British photographer Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853) as the first photobook, it is not surprising that women have consistently contributed to the rich history of photobook making. 10×10 Photobooks has organized How We See—a hands-on reading room, “books on books” publication and series of public events—to explore the distinctive content, design and intellectual attributes in photobooks produced by women.

The comprehensive How We See publication—with images and texts for all the photobooks in the project—is an invaluable reference and resource. In addition to all one hundred books in the reading room, the publication includes one hundred historical books by women photographers, an annotated chronology, and several essays on the history and practice of photobooks by women.

Featured photographers include Laia Abril, Ying Ang, Olivia Arthur, Sophie Calle, Xiaoyi Chen, Zoe Croggon, Cristina de Middel, Laura El-Tantawy, Abigail Heyman, Hannah Höch, Dragana Jurišic, Kristina Jurotschkin, Pixy Liao, Susan Meiselas, Lucia Moholy, Zanele Muholi, Yurie Nagashima, Catherine Opie, Maya Rochat, Guadalupe Ruiz, Eva Saukane, Collier Schorr, Ketaki Sheth, Lieko Shiga, Dayanita Singh, Mitra Tabrizian, Carrie Mae Weems, among many others.

See also

Dutch Female Photopgraphers How We See: Photobooks by Women 10x10 Photobooks Photography

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009
In This Dark Wood by Elisabeth Tonnard

Last weekend was another small artbook fair in New York at which I made an exciting discovery in the work of a young Dutch poet and visual artist named Elisabeth Tonnard. Tonnard has been in residence at Rochester's Visual Studies Workshop and has created several artist books over the past several years. One title that was a must own for me was her book In This Dark Wood published in 2008. I am one year late to add this to my Best of 2009 list but since I make the rules here, I will happily add it anyway.

In This Dark Wood presents a selection of photographs from an archive that is currently housed at the Visual Studies Workshop. The pictures are from a commercial photo firm called "Fox Movie Flash" which was owned by a man named Joseph Selle. Working in the San Francisco area, Selle and a team of street photographers made casually framed fleeting portraits of pedestrians intended to be sold to the passers-by after development.

Shot with half frame cameras that would hold a 100 foot roll of 35mm film, each roll captured more than 1500 photographs. The archive consists of over a million images made from the 1930s to the 70s.

Tonnard constructed her book using 90 of the photographs paired with 90 different English translations of the first line of Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la via diritta era smarrita.

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

Selle's unsuspecting subjects walking alone and caught in the light of the flash, become the multitude of alienated souls wandering "the dark woods" of the city. What is amazing about this work is how, accompanied by the suggestion of the text, the environs surrounding each subject heighten the metaphor. Movie marquees caught in the upper corners of the frames read movie titles of violence and doom; "Ring of Fire," "Hell is a City," "...from Hell," "Petrified World, "Nightfall," "Corridors of Blood."

Tonnard sequenced the photographs to emphasize repetition and further sense of - in Tonnard's words - moving "incessantly to and fro" without seemingly making any progress much like Dante's lost souls. By stressing the difference in translations, Tonnard is also emphasizing the fluidity of language and thus a path that may appear straight but is in constant flux.

In This Dark Wood is a print on demand book in an open edition. The size of a trade paperback it is simple in its design and construction which can make the price tag on first glance seem high. It isn't an elegant presentation (her creation is certainly deserving of better treatment) but the photographs are wonderfully striking and not without their individual surprise.

Highly recommended.

Check Elisabeth Tonnard's website for other books and ordering information.