synopsis
TBW Books presents What the Rain Might Bring, the debut release from photographer Dylan Hausthor. Designed as a work of art in its own right, the book features a frame—black edge and spine printing—and is completely devoid of text with only a simple title on its cover. The minimalist design sets the stage for an immersive sensory experience that intertwines the tactile and the visual, drawing readers into a world steeped in mysticism.
Inspired by David Arora’s mushroom identification guide, Hausthor’s large-format black-and-white photographs explore the rich interplay between human, plant, and animal realms. What the Rain Might Bring delves into themes of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of nature. The images evoke a sense of pagan, Wiccan, religious, anarchic, and mystic rituals, offering a visual exploration that is at once candid and full of hidden secrets.
Within Hausthor’s untamed world, characters and landscapes become conduits, weaving together new narratives that challenge perceptions of reality. The imagery—an owl mid-flight, a procession of figures, an infant nursing at its mother’s breast, a towering mushroom, and spiders in their webs—paints a world where human roles feel fragile, overshadowed by the dominance of nature. Each photograph oscillates between the eerie and enchanting, the humorous and the haunting.
Central to Hausthor’s work is a fascination with the instability of fact in storytelling. The viewer is drawn into a space where the line between truth and artistic license is deliberately blurred. Hausthor’s photography integrates elements of ad hoc investigative journalism, disinformation, and performance, disrupting traditional approaches to nature photography. The result is an exploration of a post-fact world, where the boundaries between parable and reality dissolve, leaving the viewer to question what they believe.
The book’s structure is anchored by seven delicate gatefolds, symbolizing the consecutive nights Hausthor was visited by a moth—an intimate marker of times that lends the work a diaristic quality. These pages invite readers into a ritualistic experience, transforming the book into a meditative artifact that reflects the fractured, fluid, and deeply human nature of reality itself.
Photos of the book
technical information
Publisher : TBW Books
2024
Dimensions : 20.5 x 26 cm
144 pages, 72 duotone plates
1st edition
2024
Dimensions : 20.5 x 26 cm
144 pages, 72 duotone plates
1st edition
about Dylan Hausthor
Dylan Hausthor is a conjurer of stories of dreaming and reality. They use photography, video, and installation to explore the complexities of the human condition in relationship to the natural world. Fact and fable, innocence and cunning, the spectacle and mystery of the seen and unseen. Their images imply dramas suspended, acts disrupted, and stories whispered, narratives woven with the miraculous and mundane. “Photography’s ability to promote belief is a power not dissimilar to that of faith,” they say. “I hope for these images to act as tarot cards, and the viewers exist as the medium between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.”
Hausthor received their BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design and MFA from the Yale School of Art. They are a 2024 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award, and a 2021 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves Fellowship for Visual Artists, and a winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer Fund Grant. In 2022-2023, they were a Lunder Fellow at Colby College, and in summer 2024, they will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have been an artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Penumbra Foundation, and Light Work. They have also been a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, and a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, and they have three books in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. They live in mid-coast Maine.
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Publisher : TBW Books
2024
Dimensions : 20.5 x 26 cm
144 pages, 72 duotone plates
1st edition
2024
Dimensions : 20.5 x 26 cm
144 pages, 72 duotone plates
1st edition