Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness: Volume Two

William T. Vollmann

In this landmark collection co-released by Rare Bird and Unnamed Press, William T. Vollmann offers a kaleidoscopic retrospective of the visual artwork he has produced over four decades, with new commentary from Vollmann on his process, inspiration, and the many intersections with his writing.

The celebrated author of over twenty-five books (among them the National Book Award-wining novel Europe Central; the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down, based on Vollmann’s career as a war correspondent; and the two-volume climate change investigation Carbon Ideologies), Vollmann’s equally ambitious and prolific career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter reflects the artist’s deep interest in people existing on the margins, a profound empathy for his subjects, and the humility and generosity to meet them on their terms.



Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness includes Kodachrome slides of Afghan Mujahideen from 1982; a handmade watercolor sketchbook from Subarctic Canada, complete with inscriptions to Vollmann from local Inuit teenagers; gum bichromate prints of American landscapes from Maui to Mount Desert Island; silver gelatin portfolios of insurgents, refugees, prostitutes, police, and criminals all over the world; photogenic drawings of Tahitian women; transgender self-portraits of “Dolores”; Bible woodblock prints in which God and everyone else is female; acrylic paintings of California landscapes; cyanotypes, platinotypes, salt prints, and gold-toned Vandykes, to name just a few.



Complementing these selections is a series of essays commissioned especially for this book to lay out Vollmann’s views on what photographs can and should say, how he chooses what to represent (beauty, suffering, compassion, love, desire, ideology), thoughts on photographic consensuality, and any number of technical descriptions. Particularly useful for Vollmann fans and scholars are the cross-references between these artistic and photographic projects and his books.

Praise for William T. Vollmann

"He is the maximalist’s maximalist, a PEZ dispenser of career-capping megavolumes. His books are less straight novels or stories or histories than genre-obliterating monuments to his obsessions: sex, love, violence, justice, gonzo travel, and (most notoriously) prostitution. (‘We’re a culture of prostitutes,’ he once told an interviewer.) He is both outlandishly bookish and hellaciously worldly: a haunter of archives but also a one-man literary Peace Corps."

—Sam Anderson, NY Magazine

"And the suggestion that he could win the Nobel Prize is not at all outlandish, for Vollmann may be the most ambitious, audacious writer working in America today."

—Alex Nazaryan, Newsweek

"Vollmann is a writer of considerable talent, with an encyclopedic urge to document overheard conversations, bar-stool autobiographies, lumpen manifestoes and mad soliloquies, and an itch to tell the story of the world and its people in unprecedented ways."

—Laura Miller, The New York Times

"Bill is such a unique and interesting writer that it’s always fascinating to have a look at something he’s done...his enormous range, his intellect, his deep hunger for fully researching a story and telling it from many different sides."

—Paul Slovak, Vulture

"It has always seemed that Vollmann is a writer not of this time or place. So mysterious are his motivations, so sweeping are his interests, so prodigious is his production, so vastly different is the thing he does from the thing everyone else does that he may actually be a visitor from another dimension come to report comprehensively back to his home planet."

—Mark Warren, Esquire

"An uncompromising visionary drawn to equally uncompromising material...though he has mellowed as a man, his subject matter has, if anything, grown even more confrontational."

—Tom Bissell, The New Republic