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).