A Dark Thread is a slim book built on an unusual proposition. Published by MACK in 2019, it runs to 64 pages and sets black-and-white photographs by Henry Wessel beside fiction written in response to them.

Wessel worked around the Bay Area, and his photographs are known for their fragmentary character: a scene caught mid-sentence, a gesture left unresolved, an ordinary street holding more than it discloses. The noir comparison that often attaches to this work is not decoration in this instance; the book is organised around it, and the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir film and fiction become the terms on which the pictures are offered to a reader.

More than a dozen writers of noir fiction were invited to compose a short story in response to one or more of Wessel’s photographs. This first version, published in French only, gathers French translations of stories by Art Taylor, Ivy Pochoda and Alexander MacLeod, printed alongside the images that prompted them. The result sits between literary anthology and photobook, and can be read as either.

The book appeared with a retrospective of Wessel’s work at the Maison de la Photographie in Paris in June 2019. It is a debossed and silkscreened hardback, 16 by 24 cm, with a set of four postcards held in a sleeve in the endpapers.

What should interest a collector is the structure rather than the scale. Wessel’s photographs are usually met as sequences inside a monograph; here they function as prompts, and the accompanying fiction becomes a form of close attention to them. A Dark Thread records a working method — image as starting point, narrative as reply — and does so in a format that is quiet, deliberate, and plainly not a standard survey.