Isle of Seven Cities takes as its starting point an unusual category of error: the phantom island, a landmass recorded on maps for years or centuries and later struck from them once its existence was disproved. Stéphanie Roland spent six years gathering material on these geographical fictions, working during her travels and in the reading rooms of geographical institutes. The book’s seven chapters bear the names of specific cases — Eon, Hy-Brasil, Aurora, Antilia, the Isle of Demons, the Island of California, Podesta — each attached to a different history of rumour, commercial rivalry, cartographic convention, or outright invention.
Rather than marshalling these stories into a single argument, the volume is organised as an artist’s book: an openly hybrid edition in which photographic work and written text carry equal weight. Roland is both photographer and author here, and the sequence moves by association and interruption instead of chronology. Invented and authentic archival material are set beside one another, and the accumulation of fragments produces what the book describes as a meta-island — a composite entity that raises harder questions about how credibly information behaves in a post-truth moment.
The publisher is the Eriskay Connection, and the design is by Rob van Hoesel, with lithography by Sebastiaan Hanekroot and production by Jos Morree. The edition is bilingual, English and French, and runs to 160 pages in a softcover format measuring 220 × 280 mm. Its seven-island structure gives the book an internal architecture that a loose thematic anthology would not have, and the decision to print both languages acknowledges the material’s mixed European geography.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies less in any claim to rarity than in its form. It sits between the photographic monograph and the exhibition catalogue, and it is an example of a small press building an object around an idea rather than around a portfolio. The subject itself is distinctive: phantoms that never existed nevertheless altered maps, economies, and in some accounts political conflicts. Anyone assembling photobooks that treat image-making as a form of evidence, or that investigate how fictions acquire documentary weight, will find a considered example here.
