What the Rain Might Bring — Dylan Hausthor
What the Rain Might Bring is the debut photobook by Dylan Hausthor, published by TBW Books in 2024. The hardcover volume is designed as a deliberate object: black edge and spine printing, a minimalist cover, and a text-free interior in which sequencing and material form carry the work in full.
About the Book
The photographs are large-format black-and-white images that move between human presence and the nonhuman world. Hausthor positions nature as a site of folklore, faith, and performance — a terrain where the boundary between document and staged scene is held deliberately unstable. Animals, gatherings, and close observations of plants and texture recur across the sequence without resolution or caption, placing the interpretive weight entirely on the image and its placement.
Seven gatefolds punctuate the book at intervals, functioning as structural and rhythmic interruptions. They alter the physical scale of the reading experience and mark shifts in the work's internal logic. The absence of text is not incidental — it is a formal condition that makes the gatefolds and the sequencing the primary instruments of meaning.
What the Rain Might Bring sits within a broader field of experimental documentary practice, where the constructed and the observed are allowed to coexist without hierarchy. Readers drawn to this approach may also find interest in the wider Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100, or in Hausthor's collaborative work: Sleep Creek – Dylan Hausthor & Pia Paulina Guilmoth, made with Pia-Paulina Guilmoth.
About Dylan Hausthor
Dylan Hausthor (b. 1993, Vermont) is an artist based on an island off the coast of Maine. They hold a BFA from Maine College of Art and an MFA from Yale School of Art. Hausthor has received a Nancy Graves Fellowship (2019) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), and their work is held in the permanent collection of MoMA.
Their practice combines photography with performance, research-driven storytelling, and field-based attention to particular places and species. Alongside their art-making, Hausthor teaches subjects including ritual practice, mushroom foraging, and photography — contexts that inform the constructed documentary tone running through What the Rain Might Bring.
