Casebound flexicover with printed edges and spine
144 pages (with 7 gatefolds), 72 duotone plates
8 x 10 in / 203 x 254 mm
2024
ISBN 978-1-942953-66-1
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.
