The Long Road to Ithaca

2023

(selected images from a limited edition handmade artist’s book)

  Long ago, for a backpacking journey I made over land and water from the United States east through fifteen countries to a destination in the Himalayas, I carried eighteen rolls of high speed black and white 35 mm film.  For over nine months, it was subjected to sun, rain, snow, sea water, heat, dirt, smoke, and remote border inspections. Lacking a light meter, I estimated the exposures. After returning home and developing the film, I concluded that the negatives were too damaged and dense to print. Disappointed, I  put them away in a box, in a trunk, a sad souvenir like a collection of dried flowers saved from a broken marriage, bitter nostalgia of failure. But, four decades later, when working once again with black and white film, I acquired a digital scanner. Gradually I was able to process the tiny, curly, rejected negatives into grainy and mysterious images that brought back memories of long forgotten places and of my forgotten earlier self, as if in an old dream, a film noir gift from my foreign Odyssey.

The Long Road to Ithaca is a handbound accordion style book, inkjet printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Book and Album archival paper. The poem insert is letterpress printed on Awagami Hakuho Select kozo/cotton paper in silver ink. The text typeface is Goudy Old Style.

A video of this limited edition book is posted here.

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