photographs by Hoagy Houghton
& texts by Dominic J. Jaeckle
ISBN: 978-1-8380200-1-9
380 pp / 198 x 129mm

designed and typeset by Ana Baliza;
published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe

December 2021

36 Exposures—a bastardised roll of film—is a year-long suite of verse and image by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Hoagy Houghton. Over the course of a single year, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying poem or prose-work for each image. At the year's end, the resulting collection would cover twelve months—comprising 36 images and 36 reactions—and express itself as a roll of film in the abstract. A contact sheet spoilt by written interventions; an index of distractions and elaborations; an array of materials that pictures a false or disrupted communication as ideas are exchanged and images developed over the course of a calendar year. From the onset of the project to its end, Jaeckle and Houghton never met in person—this exchange of materials was their only means of communication—and thus, this collaboration is a form of conversation twelve-months wide and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days long. The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal (short verses, prose-poems, and assimilated citations)—the images are largely personal (snapshots, familiar faces, passing objects of interest and attention)—and this aleatory work of journal-ism and paean to the second-hand idea seeks to toy with the coalescence of a photograph and its caption, to play with a poetics of description, and to dramatise differing definitions of the very word, exposure.