Ian Bates, Lost Dog, 2023

“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 Northwest, whose strangeness and magnificent solitude he captures like no other.”