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A Distant Smell of Dust by Douglas Mandry centers on a selection of deteriorated autochromes from Les Archives de la Planète, a pioneering early 20th-century photographic archive commissioned by Albert Kahn to visually document global diversity. Mandry’s reinterpretation of these historical images is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ fable On Rigor in Science, which describes an empire where cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. Later generations come to disregard the map, however, and as it decays, so does the land and society beneath it.

Through layered techniques using watercolor and lithographic ink on silk, Mandry explores the tension between visual clarity and abstraction. The work challenges the Western, naturalistic tropes embedded in the original archive, transforming them into fluid, ambiguous representations akin to heat maps or aerial views. By merging archival decay with painterly intervention, the project questions the validity of past visual paradigms and invites reflection on how nature is perceived in the age of digital acceleration. Printed on large 70 × 100 cm sheets, folded twice and bound, the book includes a bilingual (French/English) text insert featuring the essay From Archive to Matter by art historian and curator Bernard Vienat.

Published with the kind support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

Preorder – Shipping mid August

Printed in Zürich by Niedhart & Schön

Order 'Equivalences here

In a digital age of ever-faster technological innovation, Douglas Mandry explores the photographic medium. Using analog methods, he retouches each image by hand, using either vintage photographic processes or by physically cutting and pasting the images he works with. For "Unseen Sights", published in the book Equivalences, the Swiss photographer was inspired by early 20th century postcards from the Middle East. Using acrylic paint and an airbrush, he colorized black-and-white prints of landscapes in Cappadocia, Turkey, then re-photographed the compositions. Rather than merely reproducing images, the book offered the artist an opportunity to re-interpret the pictures. Playing with layers of color in print, the artist created a new representation – using, this time, a mechanical process. The original images merge with the transformed pictures, sketching out a sequence with a non-linear narrative. The title of the book pays tribute to Stieglitz's famous "Equivalents" works, which depict vertical fragments of sky and clouds and are widely considered the first abstract photo series.