Photobook: A Place Both Wonderful and Strange

Fuego Books is a small publishing house based in the south-east of Spain, founded by Angela and Gustavo Aleman in 2014. Their latest title is an anthology of photographic works called A Place Both Wonderful and Strange, inspired by the cult tv show Twin Peaks, and more generally by David Lynch production.
The book, a massive velvet blood-red hardcover volume of about 200 pages, brings together twelve international photographers along with written contributions by the authors themselves and field experts such as David Campany, Miranda Mellis and more. Divided in chapters, inside the volume each photographer has an individual space to outline the story he/she wants to share, filled with distinctive Lynchian marks. The opening key of every chapter is in fact this particular adjective, that David Foster Wallace defines his essay DAVID LYNCH KEEPS HIS HEAD: Lynchian refers to a particular kind of irony, where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former perpetual containment within the latter.. 

Flicking through the pages, the viewer meets a photographic language full of metaphors, allegories, synecdoches, synaesthesia. It is like being in front of a poem: paraphrasing every line in order to unveil the deeper meaning through the words, here instead we find pictures. Each series manages to take us into a physical place inside our head, a vivid cold dream, where skin, woods, streets and random objects taken from the everyday life combine together until they rhyme, creating a background sound that has the right level of weightless magic to become a proper melody of images. Passing from the melancholy of what it is lost to the surprise for what appears unexpectedly under our eyes. Landscapes, portraits, details articulate the rhythm, from the shading in the darkest part, to the fleeting glimpse of the bright ones. There is no time within the space: you can find yourself brushed with icy sunlight in a dull suburb and soon after sink into a shadow puddle in the corner of an impersonal room.The place both wonderful and strange is no more something worth remembering for what you achieve with your eyes but for what you feel with your guts.

Through the darkness of future past,

The magician longs to see.

One chants out between two worlds...

Fire...walk with me.

With the work of: Anna Beeke, Carl Bigmore, Melissa Catanese, Cristina de Middel, Salvi Danés, Enrico Di Nardo + Valentina Natarelli, Antone Dolezal, Philippe Fragniere, Jason Fulford, Rory Hamovit, Sara Palmieri and Sarah Walker.