Bottom of the Lake

Bottom of the Lake is Christian Patterson's book-within-a-book: an artist's book built inside a 256-page facsimile of the telephone directory his family used in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — a town whose name literally translates as "the bottom of the lake" — printed in 1973, soon after the photographer's birth.

Patterson interleaves the directory's found markings, ads and inserted ephemera with his own photographs, drawings and marginalia, producing a dark, wryly funny portrait of his hometown that resists straightforward documentary reading. The book extends past its pages: a telephone number printed inside connects callers to more than a hundred field recordings, archival audio and staged performances re-imagining the town. TBW Books published it as Book 1 of its Annual Series 4, in an edition of 1,500; a larger, retitled edition, Fond du Lac / Bottom of the Lake, followed from Walther König in 2015.

Patterson, born in Fond du Lac in 1972, first drew international attention with Redheaded Peckerwood (MACK, 2011), which wove photography, archival material and reenactment around the 1958 Starkweather-Fugate killing spree. Bottom of the Lake continues that method of splicing document and invention within a single Midwestern landscape, this time turned toward his own family history.