Storybook Series — a photo installation by Andreas Engel
Winter 2022

In the Storybook Series, Engel presents a series of fantastical landscape photographs—all taken in the Berkshires—as imagined illustrations to accompany fictional storybook illustrations, where the viewer creates the story. Several large photo installations are broken up into grid panels, like panes of windows, to encourage viewers to not just see a landscape, but to get lost in sections, details, shapes, and possibilities. Excerpts from published fictional stories accompany each image to serve as prompts to spark imagination. Small, 3×3-inch “footnote images”— sometimes photographs and sometimes paintings— accompany the featured images as abstract reference points to possibility.

Notes from the artist:

“I conjure the precious time of my early youth in the jungle of Guatemala… my father reading epic, fictional books to me and my brothers in the glow of a hissing kerosene lamp; the giant shadows of occasional bats sweeping the interior walls… me, listening, imagination soaring, looking for secrets in the occasional, illustrated pages of the book in my father’s hands… The Storybook Series is a collection of photographs I took in the Berkshires— now my beloved home in Massachusetts—that are imagined illustrations for fictional stories. My intent is for the work to be “listened to” in the viewer’s eye—to inspire imagination, discovery, and a sense of wonder.” ~ Andreas Engel