Born out of a reflection on the nature of images and their nocturnal vocation, Better in the Dark than His Rider is both a fable and a survival guide. The collected work by Francesco Merlini spans different years, possibly quite distant from one other; shot in all four continents, his pictures reveal the unique perspective of someone who, like a sleepwalker guided by ghosts, seeks for something nameless. The title is drawn, almost literally, from a 19th century manual of optics. The original sentence – “[…] much better in the dark than his rider” – refers to a horse’s night vision compared to a human’s.
The selected sequence of pictures unravels around the transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep, engaging with hypnagogia as a sensory yet dreamlike mode of semiconscious representation. Images make up mind’s psychic contents. If in dreams self-consciousness is suspended and images look real to the extent that we are sleeping, when dozing we can consciously guide them because partially aware that we are dreaming. Stated otherwise, in lucid dreams we know we are faced with the contents of our imagination, whose edges appear hallucinatory. Dreaming is a perpetual state we do experience both asleep and awake. Thanks to imagination, the dream matter turns into the mind’s real object again.

23,5×31 cm
Hard cover with embossing
Offset UV
80 pages
Paper:
Munken Lynx Rough 150 g/m²
Fedrigoni Sirio Nero 140 g/m²
Wibalin Natural Petal

Mökki n°4
Photographic Fields - Joël Van Audenhaege
Gros Gris n°4 - Duel
il y avait une ville - Laeticia L'Heureux
La troisième oreille et autres textes + CD - Bryan Lewis Saunders
Eros Negro # 1 - Demoniak
Dans la matrice : le design radical de Ken Isaacs - Susan Snodgrass
Le chateau enchanté - Atelier Mclane
Délié - Baptiste Oberson
Donne des racines au loup-garou & fais courir l'arbre la nuit - Pauline Barzilaï
the Ghost of Weaving - Coll.
La prise - Florian Javet
Modern Instances, The Craft of Photography - Stephen Shore
À partir de n°1 - Coll.
Good Company - Paul Van der Eerden
Il était deux fois - Gary Colin
Salt Crystal - Fabio Parizzi
š! #39 'The End' - coll. 































