Wolfgang

Using photographs drawn from the archives of the CERN laboratory, David Fathi builds Wolfgang around a piece of scientific folklore: the "Pauli Effect," the belief that physicist Wolfgang Pauli caused unexplainable equipment failures simply by entering a room.

The book gathers accidents, malfunctions and unexplained anomalies from the CERN archive; some images are left untouched, others manipulated by the artist, so that art, science and history run together and the reader is left to sort myth from record. Skinnerboox published the 164-page hardcover in an edition of 500 in September 2016, designed by Ramon Pez with text by Jeffrey Ladd. It was named a best photobook of the year by The Guardian, LensCulture and several photobook critics.

Fathi, a French artist working with appropriated and archival photography, treats found imagery as raw material for invented histories rather than documentary evidence. A second, reworked edition, Wolfgang², followed in 2018.