Elisabeth Tonnard

The Man of the Crowd is about observing and being observed in the urban crowd. It connects Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ to a chance occurrence photographed in a Parisian street. A series of 56 photographs shows an old man appearing and disappearing in a miscellaneous crowd of people drifting by. The photos are followed by experimental textworks that reprocess Poe’s story, exhibiting the story’s latent messages and providing intricate connections to the photoseries.

Edition of 14 + 2 AP, numbered. Inkjet print, full color.
76 single-sided sheets (12.7 x 17.8 cm) in a box.
Rochester, NY 2008.

This edition can be exhibited on small shelves. For some installation views see this page.

The edition is sold out.

In 2012 I published a bound version of this work.

See some more images here. Read a discussion of the work by Annette Gilbert in Reprint, Appropriation (&) Literature, Luxbooks, 2014.

The edition is included in the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bodleian Library (special collections at Weston Library), Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature, National Library of The Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), and Nederlands Fotomuseum.