Elisabeth Tonnard, In This Dark Wood (2013)

“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.”    —Elisabeth Tonnard

“Elisabeth Tonnard’s In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.’ (‘In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost’). The images were selected from the 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 to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.”    –J & L Books

The book is available for purchase through the publisher’s site.

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas, Austin)

Related Sighting

Caroline Bergvall, Via: 48 Dante Variations (2004)