The Girl in the Fifth Floor Walk-Up

The Girl in the Fifth Floor Walk-Up casts a set of Polaroids as a paperback noir, building a fictional case file around a single recurring character.

Charles Johnstone photographed Heather Malesson, his longtime muse and collaborator, then designed the book around an excerpt from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, using 1940s pulp typography and layout to cast the pictures as evidence in an invented case. The linen hardcover was published by S_U_N_ in New York in 2014 as a signed first edition of 200 copies, 64 pages; a later deluxe octavo edition of 10 numbered copies included an original Polaroid, alongside a trade edition of 150 copies in red cloth signed by both Johnstone and Malesson.

Johnstone, a New York-based photographer who has self-published more than a dozen photo books, built the project as a companion to his earlier Libby, another Polaroid-based book centered on Malesson. Both works trace a documentary and performative collaboration between photographer and subject that has continued across more than a decade.