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 casebound flexicover volume carries printed black edges and spine, a title as its only cover text, and a text-free interior in which sequencing and material form carry the work in full.
About the Book
Hausthor's large-format black-and-white photographs move between human, plant, and animal registers, drawing on David Arora's mushroom identification guide as a point of departure. Nature is treated as a site of storytelling, faith, and folklore rather than as neutral subject matter — the images gesture toward pagan, Wiccan, religious, and anarchic ritual without settling on any single reading. An owl in flight, a procession of figures, an infant nursing, a towering mushroom, and spiders in their webs recur across the sequence, each photograph balanced between the eerie and the enchanting.
Central to the work is an interest in the instability of fact within documentary photography. Hausthor's practice folds in elements of investigative journalism, disinformation, and staged performance, holding the line between observed and constructed image deliberately unstable. Seven gatefolds punctuate the book at intervals, marking the consecutive nights on which the artist was visited by a moth — a diaristic device that gives the sequence a quiet, ritual rhythm and alters the physical scale of reading at each interruption.
The absence of text is a formal condition rather than an omission: with no captions or narrative anchor, the gatefolds and the sequencing become the primary instruments through which the work is read. What the Rain Might Bring sits within a wider field of experimental documentary practice, where constructed and observed imagery are allowed to coexist without hierarchy.
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.
Readers drawn to this approach may also find interest in the wider Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100, or in Hausthor's collaborative work: Sleep Creek, made with Pia-Paulina Guilmoth.
