False Lighthouse

“Pages turn. Light gleams in our darkness. Thresholds present themselves. Yearning gains momentum. Curiosity swells.”

Leah Ollman in False Lighthouse

False Lighthouse: a false coastal light (or the extinction of a light) which lures ships onto rocky shores. Nautical legend has it that wreckers deliberately decoyed ships onto coasts using false lights so that they crashed ashore for easy plundering.

Comprised entirely of found photographs from the Peter J. Cohen Collection, False Lighthouse is artist Yael Eban’s layered examination of photography’s material and metaphysical attributes.

The design of this book pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s seminal work To the Lighthouse, a novel which functions almost as a psychological poem, straining against the restrictions of traditional narrative and playing with our perceptions of time. Woolf described the structure of her novel as if it were a letter H, or “two blocks joined by a corridor.” False Lighthouse, too, exists on parallel planes, with the two essays at the center by Leah Ollman and Anna Lee bridging the divergent photographic narratives that flank them on either side.