What the Rain Might Bring by Dylan Hausthor
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Designed as an object as much as a book, its stark black edges and spine printing frame the images like a portal. It bears no words beyond the title—stripping away distraction and pulling the viewer into a realm where the tactile and the visual fuse into a singular, hypnotic experience.
Hausthor’s large-format black-and-white photographs blur the boundaries between documentation and fable, between observation and conjuration. Drawing inspiration from David Arora’s mushroom identification guide, the book unearths a world where human, plant, and animal life intertwine—an eerie, untamed ecology where meaning is slippery and stories grow like spores.
Faith, folklore, queerness, and the occult pulse through these images: an owl frozen mid-flight, a procession of hooded figures, a towering mushroom bathed in spectral light, a child nursing in the half-dark, spiders suspended in gossamer nets. These are not mere photographs—they are fragments of a ritual, a visual incantation that flickers between the sacred and the anarchic, the primal and the surreal.
At the heart of Hausthor’s work is an obsession with the fragility of fact. Photography here is less about capturing reality than about unraveling it—layering storytelling, investigative impulse, and performative disinformation into a meditation on our post-truth condition. What is real? What is staged? Hausthor offers no answers, only a sense of unsteadiness, of narrative slipping through one’s fingers.
This instability carries into the book’s structure, anchored by seven delicate gatefolds—seven nights marked by the repeated visitation of a moth. This quiet, intimate occurrence transforms the book into something more than a collection of images. It becomes a diary, a relic, a living thing, its pages unfolding like wings, inviting the viewer into an experience as fluid and fragmented as memory itself.
What the Rain Might Bring is not a document—it is an artifact, a spell, an offering. Hausthor doesn’t just photograph the world; he conjures it anew, leaving us to wander its mysteries long after the last page is turned.