The Oblivion Atlas, a collaboration between Louviere+Vanessa and Michael Allen Zell, features photographs, short stories, vignette illustrations, and a book design by Jeff Louviere no less sublime than its contents.

The book first came about as a constraint determined by Zell from the initial lines of Jacques Prevert’s To Paint A Portrait Of A Bird (“First paint a cage/with an open door”), secondly by the attempt at developing a corollary style of frozen-image writing as worthy counterpart to the hypnotic spells cast by photography and long takes in film, and ultimately by the specific influence and inspiration of L+V’s fertile decade of photographic art. The second ballast was formed by Louviere + Vanessa’s visual response to the context of lost souls in crisis and finding one’s way rather than visually repeating actions already described.

The Oblivion Atlas explores and accumulates an aviary of themes, including dreams; time-sculpting; memory; madness; resistance; nihilism; the frequencies and trajectories of the mind; absorbing/dissolving; and infinity in a finite space. New Orleans remains a steady companion throughout, as an active guiding presence treated in a singular manner. This book is precise but not taut, assertive but not doctrinaire, ambitious but not exclusive, inviting the reader in by its very design and the affirmation that

“…the first act of freedom is when the mind says no and the second when it says yes.”