RIVER’S DREAM by Curran Hatleberg, TBW Books

11.5 × 13.5 in
152 pages
Casebound with dust jacket
TBW Books, 2022
First edition, first printing

River’s Dream is a complete realization of the series exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. 

Curran Hatleberg is known for traveling America, guided by intuition, to create scenes of American life and landscape. Working collaboratively with the people he meets, he recounts intimate stories of family and community. Here, in the follow-up to his first monograph Lost Coast (TBW Books, 2016), Hatleberg centers his narrative on the dog days of summer. Sweltering heat, dripping humidity, lush vegetation, and screaming insects—River’s Dream is a pulsing and episodic hallucination of life lived outdoors. In these sixty-five photographs, we move through swamps and groves, front yards and junkyards, encountering moments of haunting mystery and beautiful impermanence. Heightened by formal repetition, echo, and refrain, everyday scenes take on surreal, allegorical qualities. In the end, Hatleberg leaves us with the impression of memory, where the past is never gone, but appears and reappears endlessly, as in the flickering of a dream.

This book includes new texts by Natasaha Trethewey and Joy Williams.