Oriane Thomasson’s Atlantis takes Plato’s drowned island as a working premise rather than a subject to be illustrated. Published by Eriskay Connection in 2025, the book gathers photographs Thomasson made across various landscapes and sets them beside archival images, arranging the whole as a photographic fiction. A commissioned science-fiction short story, “The Meteors,” runs with the pictures, so that the sequence moves between a before and an after: the pull of a lost paradise, and the marks left once it collapses.
The myth itself is treated as an argument about how history gets written. Thomasson’s correspondences between her own exposures and found material blur the line between what is documented and what is devised, and the book is frank about its interest in that blur. Archaeology and history appear here not as neutral archives but as narrative practices, their documents reusable as the raw material of invention. The result is closer to speculative historiography than to travel or landscape photography, and it reads as a deliberate continuation of the concerns Thomasson opened in Paradis.
The physical book carries that thinking into its making. Across eighty pages, Atlantis is printed on four papers, each tied to a category of image: a warm tone for the island and its Greek landscape; a thin, translucent sheet for traces of a lost culture and the idea of oblivion; bright white for images of transition, from sinking terrain to a man with a fish head; and coated stock printed full-bleed for the underwater pictures, pressing the submersion of the city into the page. Rob van Hoesel’s design, with lithography by Sebastiaan Hanekroot and printing by Wilco Art Books, treats material and sequence as part of the argument. English and French texts are bound in a single paperback volume of roughly 19.5 by 29 centimetres.
For a collector, the case rests on what the book does with the photobook as a form. Thomasson works with cycles of disappearance and resurgence, and the shifts between papers make reading a physical rather than merely optical experience. As a sustained collaboration between photographer, designer, lithographer and printer, and as a fiction assembled from images and writing rather than a portfolio of plates, it rewards attention to sequencing, surface and the deliberate confusion of evidence with invention.
