Leaves of Absence:
Photographs by Dana MacFarlane, Text by Ruth Thomas
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In this unique collaboration, Dana MacFarlane and Ruth Thomas use photographs and text to explore the moments of intensity and equivocation that define a relationship. Objects left behind or fallen on pavements in Edinburgh and sidewalks in New York evoke a shifting record of worlds. They figure against an elusive tale told through fragments of dialogue. The book resists any conventions that assume one medium illustrating the other - the elements of the book insert a radical questioning of perspective and emotional affect.
Dana MacFarlane is an art historian who is currently an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. She studied at the University of Toronto and completed her PhD at the University of Essex. She was a Commonwealth Scholar and a Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum fellow in the History of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada. She works on early photography, the forms of subjectivity it produced, and the photographic reproduction of works of art, as well as the role of photography in Surrealism. Her numerous publications in the journal History of Photography and in edited volumes situate photography in historical, literary and philosophical contexts. Dana’s photographic projects are embedded in these earlier traditions which above all valued the transitory and role of chance in photographic representation. She remains intrigued by the powerful psychological presence of found objects in photographs.
Ruth Thomas is a novelist and short story writer and has held posts as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow and as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Her first novel, Things to Make and Mend (Faber, 2007) won a Good Housekeeping ‘Most Entertaining Read’ Award, and her most recent, The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line (Sandstone, 2021) was broadcast as a BBC R4 Book at Bedtime. Ruth’s writing has won or been shortlisted for various awards in the UK including the John Llewellyn Rhys Award, the Saltire Society First Book Award and the VS Pritchett Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. Commenting on Ruth’s third story collection the novelist Ali Smith wrote: 'It is to some extent a comic universe, to a larger extent an existential one according to Thomas’, and comedy, tragicomedy and existentialism remain central preoccupations in her work.