LOST DOG by Ian Bates, Deadbeat Club

7 × 9 in
48 pages
Digital offset printing
Softcover staple binding
Tip-in 
Deadbeat Club, 2024
First edition

Lost Dog opens with a cat inquisitively turning towards us—a character inviting us to a vast land.

And we can indeed speak of character, so much does Lost Dog resemble a fable. Throughout the pages, Bates is the solitary traveler on an odyssey, coming across with elusive figures, crossing depopulated places that, always, retain the mysterious traces of a past presence—wreckage landed on the branches of a dead tree, details of a forgotten domestic life, blood stains on immaculate snow… and sometimes, among the crystal-clear images, a tenderness emerges here and there, rays of warmth found in a woman’s gaze or in a benevolent flame.

Through valleys and mountains, Ian Bates offers with Lost Dog a portrait of a mysterious American North West, whose strangeness and magnificent solitude he captures like no other.