The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer

Amani Willett's photobook retells the story of Joseph Plummer, a hermit who lived in the woods of central New Hampshire in the late 1700s, through landscape photographs, archival material and altered period images.

Two centuries after Plummer, Willett's father bought the land and built a cabin there, unaware of the hermit's history. Willett photographed the same terrain, searched local archives for first-hand accounts of Plummer, and included personal effects attributed to him. Historical portraits and landscape views from the region are worked over with appliqué and collage. The book keeps Plummer's history partly unknowable and sets the wish to withdraw from society against present-day technology. Overlapse published it in London in October 2017 as a hardcover of 136 pages, with 50 colour and 28 black-and-white photographs, interior tip-ins and gold foil on the cover and spine. It was designed by Tiffany Jones and later reissued as a paperback Cabin Edition.

Willett is a Brooklyn photographer whose work concerns family, history, memory and the social environment. His first monograph, Disquiet (Damiani, 2013), appeared on several best-of-year lists. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2012).