Blisner, IL: An Index of Work as Labour as Work

Daniel Shea's Blisner, IL maps the aftermath of industrial collapse across southern Illinois, using a fictional composite town, Blisner, as a frame for photographs of real post-industrial landscapes and the people who remain in them.

The book is structured as an index, pairing photographs with text in a format the artist has described as both a new edition and a pseudo-sequel to an earlier, self-published version of the project. It was published as a 192-page hardcover by Fourteen-Nineteen, London, in 2014, with an accompanying essay by Walter Benn Michaels. A limited special edition, distributed through Loose Joints, later reissued the project once the first edition had gone out of print.

The project extends Shea's ongoing documentary interest in American industrial decline and the labor economies left behind by it, following his earlier photographic work on coal and steel regions of the Midwest.