Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor

Taking Off. Henry My Neighbor is a Dutch artist's book that assembles the photographs, collages and clay figures of a man named Henry into a story of a failed marriage, voyeurism and obsession.

Mariken Wessels presents the book as the edited archive of Henry, whose studio she reached through people she met while travelling in the United States. He had photographed his wife and muse, Martha, and sorted more than 5,500 black-and-white nudes into a private classification. When she saw the archive she threw it into the street and left. He cut up what survived, made collages, modelled clay figures from them, and finally disappeared into the woods. Across 330 pages of colour and black-and-white images, the reader follows his vision of her.

Wessels (b. 1963) trained as an actor before studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and works in artist's books, photography, film, sculpture and installation, often with appropriated imagery. The book, designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt and Wessels, was published by Art Paper Editions in May 2015 in an edition of 1,000, with a second edition of 1,000 in February 2017. It won the Author Book Award at Rencontres d'Arles in 2016 and was named among the Best Dutch Book Designs of 2015.