100 Views of the Drowning World.

Photographs by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick.

Candela Books, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2017. 208 pp., color illustrations, 8½x11".

Against a backdrop of ecological decline, this memoir/travelogue follows Dr. Falke (the narrator), Count Orlofsky, and Madame Lulu, three members of an itinerant theatrical troupe known as the Truppe Fledermaus, as they stage absurdist performances in various locations including Europe, England, America, and Japan. In these performances, often staged in nature with no audience, the Truppe are as apt to commemorate the passing of an unusual cloud as they are to be found documenting their own attempts to flee the rising waters of a warming planet, or using black humor to comment upon the extinction of bats or other animals.

The book, whose physical design format is modeled on Ukiyo-e series such as Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo, contains photographs of the Truppe, their travels, and their performances with corresponding text narrating the images. It is the author’s preference to have the pages of the book be loose and non-linear so that readers can explore the images and story in any order they prefer. As the incidents related in the book are frequently based on the artist’s personal experiences and travels, the reader is led to speculate about the somewhat arbitrary manner in which we build narratives out of our own experiences.

The beautiful images and corresponding text vignettes represent an enormous effort by these artists and rewards repeated visits, as even one reading is a commitment and with each visit to this collection, the story will have been again re-imagined.

About the Artists

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who have been working together since they met while attending art school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s. Both were born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. Kahn & Selesnick have participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 20 collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

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