Pacifico Silano’s “I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine” is an artist’s book rooted in the printed ephemera of gay culture. Silano, an American conceptual artist, excavates vintage gay erotica and works through framing, cropping and layering to create new images that comment on loss, longing and queer melancholy. His practice addresses the HIV/AIDS crisis and its reverberations on queer lives, which included the loss of his uncle at the height of the epidemic. This is Silano’s first artist’s book, and it carries that history into a format that asks to be read physically and over time.

The book is built as an ambitious accordion-folded structure that references Silano’s photo-based installations: two twenty-panel long sequences that can be read as both one continuous collage and a sequence of individual images. The trimmed hardcover with continuous leporello binding holds 40 pages and 40 colour plates at 200 × 250 mm.

Included in the book is an interview with the artist by José Diaz, Chief Curator of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Since its original publication in 2021 the book has been nominated for multiple awards and featured in numerous exhibitions and catalogue surveys of the contemporary photobook, becoming a rare and highly sought-after title. It was shortlisted for PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2021 and for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards 2021, and was named among MoMA’s Favorite Photobooks of 2021 and TIME’s 20 Best Photobooks of 2021. This second printing is published by Loose Joints in June 2026. Silano, born in Brooklyn, NY, received his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts; his work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art and Musée de l’Elysée, Switzerland.