NTSOTWBH (Never Take Shortcuts On The Way Back Home)

NTSOTWBH: Never Take Shortcuts On The Way Back Home works from the Interpol missing-persons database, the only public international registry of its kind, to ask what a photograph does once it is disconnected from the person it depicts.

Benedetta Pomini drew on a snapshot of the database from July 2014, when it listed 832 open cases across ninety countries, 129 of them without a photograph at all; Jamaica, Colombia, and Honduras returned the highest numbers. The book sets these images and their case data side by side, treating the database's mix of ID photos, snapshots, and blank entries as a study of how an image is asked to stand in for a person who is absent, legally presumed dead in most countries after seven years and in Italy only after ten. Pomini designed the 196-page book herself; it was published by Skinnerboox, the Jesi-based Italian photobook press, in September 2015, digitally offset-printed with PUR binding.