Let’s Get Lost: an illuminated selection

You are so young, barely a novice, and I would like to urge you, so far as I can, dear Sir, to have patience towards everything that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a very foreign language. For now, don't look for answers which cannot be given to you because you can't yet have lived them. And the great thing is to live everything. For now live the questions. Perhaps then you will gradually – one far-off day, without even noticing it – live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 16 July 1903

This is a selection of twenty-six page-spreads from a larger book, Let's Get Lost, available as an "on demand" publication from my Blurb Bookstore.

The original, complete book is a relatively plain 116 pages, containing a series of "postcards", topographic photographs extracted from my backfiles, arranged into pairs, and sequenced around six simple, "liveable" questions ("Where On Earth Am I?", "How Did I Get Here?", "Are We Lost Yet?", etc.). For this smaller selection, I chose to embed each pair of facing photographs into a single unifying "illuminated" two-page frame, an approach that suggested itself when creating the twelve images for my 2021 calendar. The pages are presented in the order that they are found in the complete, sequenced book, with their original page numbers, but without the schematic framework of the six questions.

Are these decorative pages a reframing of those original questions, or do they constitute a seventh, more opaque question written in "a very foreign language"? Who knows? But if you're happy to join me on this photographic dérive, then let's get lost.

Mike Chisholm, 2020