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SPECIAL EDITION
Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 25 copies, which include a signed and editioned book plus a unique hand-painted photo collage by the artist (approx. 20 x 25 cm, two examples in the last two images).
Patrick Pound skirts the line between artist and pictorial treasure hunter. Digging through online marketplaces, estate sales, and flea markets, the New Zealand-born, Australian-based artist has amassed more than 80,000 photographs in his multi-decade career, organising his collection into 130 categories. L is for lonely – which follows Windows, his 2024 book for Perimeter Editions – once made for a compelling drawer of prints in his studio. It now makes for an even more compelling book.
L is for lonely comprises photographs from defunct and dispersed cinema and newspaper archives. Each of the photographs contains the word ‘lonely’ or ‘loneliness’. The word might appear in a film title on the front of a picture, or in the original associated press article attached to the back of a newspaper photograph. Every photograph is depicted from both sides.
The full gamut of the idea of loneliness marinates in these photographs and their material forms. From a picture of a lonely lane where a kidnapping took place, to a promotional still from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or a newspaper image of a drone over a lonely desert, this singular tragicomic collection constraint quietly absorbs the entire human condition. The photographs range in subject matter from ‘a lonely photographer kidnapped by a fugitive FBI agent’ to a missing person ‘partially buried behind a chicken coop near Lake Lonely’.
Here, loneliness is found in animal and human form, in all kinds of people and places, and in states of feeling. Strangely, there is comfort and life to be found in the saturation of these stories, and the melancholy beauty of these remnant lyrical documents. While the material culture on display is beautiful and rich – in all its manky newspaper reportage and cinematic splendour – it is also somehow prescient. In these photographs, the present is reflected right back at us. For Pound is not simply interested in these documents for nostalgic returns. Rather, he redeploys them to re-read the past and to rethink the present, with the future front of mind.
As the artist puts it: ‘When you collect under a single collection constraint, the rest of the world always sneaks in.’ Race, class, sex, gender, crime, politics, and some fun, find their way into the scheme of things. There are laughs and there are moments that might just pull you up. Like a lonely hearts club, this book is full of all kinds of loneliness.
224 pages, 21 x 27 cm, softcover, Perimeter Editions (Naarm/Melbourne).