I gather the sorrow of darkness into the pages of a book
我想把黑色的哀傷都收納在一枚冊本裡
(PUBLICATION: an elegy, 6x9 inch, 112 pages, 2024)
After the passing of Holly, I created a work in October consisting of fifty photographs. It was included in TERRAIN, a collaborative project with Gary Michael Dault, in which he wrote fifty pieces of haiku to accompany the images. This became the eleventh volume of TERRAIN. Later, I developed my fifty photographs into a separate book—essentially a poem composed with photographs.
The book is smaller in size, measuring 6x9 inches vertically. Each photograph spans a full spread across two pages. Since the original images were square, a small portion from the top or bottom had to be cropped. Additionally, some details in the center of the images are slightly lost in the gutter where the two pages meet. However, these minor losses in the visuals are not critical—the main focus is the overall impression, the flow, and the emotion conveyed by the work as a whole.
The entire book feels heavy, deep, and profoundly dark. I titled it “an elegy”. The cover features a line of Chinese text: 我想把黑色的哀傷都收納在一枚冊本裡(I gather the sorrow of darkness into the pages of a book). The black cover was created by layering several of the darker photographs on top of one another.
楚喬離去後，我在十月間做了一個作品，共五十張照片。放在與Gary Michael Dault 合作中的TERRAIN，他寫了五十闕俳句。是為TERRAIN的第十一冊。後來，我把我的五十張照片，另外構成一本書，一首以照片寫成的詩。這個書較細小，6x9吋直度，我把每張照片做個通版對頁。原來的照片是方度的，因此需要上或下裁去一點，而且，照片的中部，也會因兩書頁的相連位，而有一點會略去。不過這些畫面上的一點流失，也不是那麼重要，主要的還是整體。整體流動產生起來的感覺。整本書都是深沉，黑重重的，我把題目稱做 an elegy (哀歌)。封面放了一行中文寫的［我想把黑色的哀傷都收納在一枚冊本裡]。黒色的封面，其實是幾張較深沉的照片重疊在一起。