The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer begins with a story that sits between local history, folklore, and photographic fiction. Joseph Plummer, a mysterious hermit, is said to have lived in the woods of central New Hampshire in the late eighteenth century. Two centuries later, a man buys the land associated with this mythical loner and builds a secluded cabin, only to encounter the lingering legend within the forest. Amani Willett’s book takes this premise as the basis for an atmospheric meditation on withdrawal and belief.

Rather than treating solitude as a simple escape, the work considers why the desire to disappear remains compelling. The forest becomes both setting and psychological space: a place removed from the burdens and apparatus of modern society, but also one in which stories gather, persist, and acquire a life of their own. The Plummer narrative gives the photographs a precise imaginative framework while leaving room for uncertainty, allowing fact, recollection, and invention to remain productively entangled.

Published by Overlapse in 2017, this first-edition English-language hardcover contains 136 pages. Its compact portrait format suits a book whose force lies in sustained atmosphere and narrative accumulation rather than spectacle. The sequence is best approached as a constructed tale, in which the presence of a vanished figure is conveyed indirectly through place, seclusion, and the traces of a search for peace. That restraint distinguishes the project from straightforward documentary treatments of rural life or historical anecdote.

For collectors, the book deserves attention as a focused example of contemporary photobook storytelling: a single authored work that joins the legend of an eighteenth-century recluse to a modern fantasy of retreat. The edition is recorded as out of print, making its first-edition status relevant to those assembling Overlapse’s publishing history or following the development of narrative-led photographic practice. Its subject remains concise, but its questions—what it means to leave society, and what follows when solitude becomes a story—are deliberately expansive.