'Strangely suggestive black-and-white images of suburban America...peering into the ordinary lives of strangers' – Financial Times

"Ces clichés, hantés pour la plupart par le cinéma, déploient leur "beauté dans le sinistre" et réveillent l'imaginaire." / "These shots, often haunted by cinema, reveal a 'beauty in the sinister' and awaken the imagination" – L'Express

"Son travail reflètant le récit fantasmé de la réalité, avec constamment la potentialité d’un scénario. À chacun d’imaginer une histoire." / "His work reflects the fantastical story of reality, with the constant possibility of a narrative. It's up to each person to imagine the story." - Arts in the City


The work of the recently deceased Bay-area photographer, Henry Wessel, is renowned for its fragmentary and compelling nature, each image urging imaginative leaps towards the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir film and fiction. Every Wessel photograph is a gateway to a wild array of extraordinary storylines.

This project, A Dark Thread, takes this semblance of an idea further by commissioning over a dozen renowned noir writers to produce a short story in response to one or more of Wessel’s black and white photographs. This first version of the project brings together French translations of stories by Art Taylor, Ivy Pochoda, and Alexander MacLeod, together with the photographs that inspired them.

Straddling the space between literary publishing and photobook, this slim volume offers a new and original means of understanding Henry Wessel’s photography and accompanies a retrospective of his work at the Maison de la Photograhie in Paris (June 2019).