Can't Pay You to Disappear

Thomas Vandenberghe's Can't Pay You to Disappear is a handmade photobook that unravels the life span of an intense relationship, where love, obsession and loss run together into a single, urgent narrative.

The book pairs fragments of dialogue, spoken between an unnamed couple, with images scanned directly from Vandenberghe's original darkroom prints, mostly reproduced at their original size so that the physical trace of his process, cropping, blur, torn and collaged prints, remains visible on the page. Published by AKINA Books in a first edition of 200 copies, it is bound with a French-fold stab-strip structure and silkscreened in two colours on white cloth, sold out shortly after release.

The book also marks a shift in Vandenberghe's photography, from early, minimal images toward physical intervention on the print itself, collage, tearing and repetition, a strategy he returned to in later, related work built around the same relationship.