Sleep Creek — Collaborative Photobook by Dylan Hausthor and Pia Paulina Guilmoth
Sleep Creek is a collaborative photobook by Dylan Hausthor and Pia Paulina Guilmoth, made entirely in the backwoods of New England. Working across portraits, animals, gestures, and landscape, the two artists construct a world in which documentary observation and staged construction are held in deliberate, unresolved tension. The sequence does not move toward a single conclusion; it circles back through the same terrain, the same figures, and the same uncertain light until place itself becomes the central subject.
The book's visual logic is nocturnal and accumulative. Smoke, skin, fur, mud, and water are registered with the same granular attention, refusing a hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman, the witnessed and the arranged. Colonial histories, rural labour, and intimate bodies share the frame without explanation or resolution. The boundary between fact and fiction is not blurred carelessly — it is held open as a structural condition of the work, inseparable from how the artists describe their experience of the world: without clear beginnings, middles, or ends, and without a hard line between the lived and the directed.
Hausthor and Guilmoth are co-founders of Wilt Press, a publication studio concerned with the myth of place and the complexity of image-based narrative. Sleep Creek belongs to a sustained practice of long-term engagement with the Northeastern United States — a region they chose not to represent as a regional identity but to use as a stage for ideas of story, character, and memory that exceed any specific geography. Published by Void, this is the 2nd Print edition of 2000 copies, in a foiled open-spine softcover format, 17 × 21.5 cm, 144 pages, ISBN 978-618-5479-06-0. Collectors and readers working through the current field of Photography & Photobooks will find in this edition a considered entry point into a rigorous and sustained collaborative practice.
About the Artists
Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Dylan Hausthor work collaboratively in the forests and small towns of the Northeastern United States. Their practice centres on long-term engagement with place, using photography, bookmaking, and small-scale publishing to investigate how stories are told through images. As co-founders of Wilt Press, established in the winter of 2015, they produce editions that move between documentary observation and constructed narrative.
In their shared projects, Guilmoth and Hausthor draw on rural communities, local myths, and family histories to question the boundaries of evidence and fiction. Their work resists clear resolution, building worlds in which each photograph functions simultaneously as a fragment of lived experience and a carefully shaped scene.
