Portent is the thirty-seventh title in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, and its subject is nothing less than the credibility of the impossible. Across ten four-color plates, Tanya Marcuse stages scenes in swamps, rivers, and orchards near her Hudson Valley home that appear to defy natural law: golden snakes coiled around branches, blue fire, blood-red snow, apples sealed in ice. No digital effects are involved; the photographs were made in all seasons, weathers, and hours, which is precisely what makes them unsettling. The book asks the viewer to hold fact and fiction together rather than choose between them.
The work belongs to Book of Miracles, a project Marcuse began during the 2020 lockdown and developed through wildfire seasons, extreme temperatures, and political upheaval. Portent draws on Part II of that larger undertaking and stands in explicit conversation with the sixteenth-century Augsburg Wunderzeichenbuch, the illustrated compendium of biblical, astronomical, and apocalyptic wonders and omens. That historical mirror gives the pictures their double edge: what once counted as a portent and what now reads as ecological disturbance or photographic artifice are deliberately left unresolved.
As a physical object, the book is modest in extent and unusually layered. It runs sixteen pages in hardcover, carries ten color plates, and includes an original photograph signed by Marcuse alongside a letterpress print of an excerpt from the Augsburg Book of Miracles, translated, typeset, and printed by her son Jacob Romm at Letter and Spirit Press. The edition is limited to 500 numbered copies. The letterpress insert is not decoration; it binds the contemporary photographs to their source text and makes the book a collaboration as much as a monograph.
For a collector, the interest lies in that combination: a tightly edited sequence from a named part of an ongoing project, a signed original print, and a typographic quotation that completes the argument. Marcuse’s large-scale tableaux of the imperiled natural world are held by institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, and she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Portent distills that practice into a small, deliberate format where the marvelous and the evidentiary are made to occupy the same page.
