Benjamin Pfau

“But it's just because the chances are all against you,

just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.

Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows.”

- Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer

The Isthmus I am referring to is not a place, but a condition. One can think of it as a certain passage of time most of us experience at one point or another, a moment in life when the world around oneself seems to shrink, like a ridge between two oceans, a path that becomes narrower and narrower while the waves are crashing in from both sides and one hopes that the waves won't take one, that one is not just walking into the depth of the dark sea, but that there are firm grounds to walk on wherever one is going. The book is a diary and it is not. Yes, it is personal in the sense that it is intimate, but the images also remain vaguely non-descriptive, so that it is difficult to get a firm grasp of the situation. When I write my own diary, I don’t attempt to renarrate my life by making a neat string of pearls. Instead, it is a collection of sporadic sprints, little sketches that carry significance at one point of time, vague impressions that I want to clarify and try not to forget. The majority of this work was shot over a two-year period in my late twenties, mostly in Bangkok.

first edition of 1000

softcover

112 pages

18 x 26 cm

swiss binding (black thread stitching)

printed in Germany

published by Studio Benjamin Pfau, 2019

ISBN 978-3-9821258-0-0