Simon Brugner’s The Arsenic Eaters begins with a belief that sounds like folklore and turns out to be documented practice. Through the pre-industrial eastern Alps, particularly Styria, peasants and labourers are said to have swallowed arsenic, one of the most potent mineral poisons, not to die but to appear robust, rosy and resilient, and to sharpen sexual potency. Mines in the region reach back centuries. The habit was hidden, taboo, and thought impossible to abandon. Brugner, who conceived the book and made the photographs, treats this history neither as curiosity nor as sensation.
The book’s architecture is deliberate. Its first part is a visual study that seeks a live connection between the old poison eaters and the present, constructing a plausible world in which the surreal account holds together. The second gathers Brugner’s cultural-historical findings on mining, superstition, medicine and Alpine life before the twentieth century. Contemporary photographs stand alongside archival material, so the reader moves between speculation and document rather than being handed a single verdict.
Rob van Hoesel’s design and edit, with Scott Clifford Evans as text editor and Brugner sharing the edit, give the project a controlled, essayistic shape: 144 pages, 20.5 by 30 centimetres, Otabind softcover in a vinyl dustcover, published by Eriskay Connection in 2018. Production credits include lithography by Sebastiaan Hanekroot, production by Jos Morree, printing by Wilco Art Books and binding by Patist, with support from Das Land Steiermark, Wien Kultur and rhtb: projekt Retter Reisen. The English-language edition carries the publisher’s ISBN 9789492051356.
For a collector, the appeal lies here: a photographer who is also the researcher, a subject that sits at the meeting point of medical history, class, superstition and landscape, and a two-part structure that lets images and evidence interrogate each other. It is a book about how a community explains its own endurance, and about what a photograph can do with a story that refuses to settle.
