Another Water.

Text and illustrations by Roni Horn.

Scalo, Zurich, 2000. 96 pp., 36 color illustrations, 8x11½".

(When you see yourself reflected in water, do you recognize the water in you ?) Certainly you remember sitting by a river, gazing at its ever-changing surface, imagining the stories it could tell. Roni Horn, whose series of books on Iceland are among the most innovative and accessible artist’s books of the past decade, recreates this experience in Another Water, taking her assured and masterful experiments with the medium of the book one step further.

I’ve seen rivers with black water. I mean black as not in green and blue or yellow. I mean real black. But they don’t feel dark the way the Thames does. The Thames has a darkness that makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be there even if it wasn’t black.

Another Water combines double-page photographs of the water flowing down the river Thames with footnotes at the bottom of the page - incisive observations, fragments of stories, philosophical reflections, quotes from pop songs and literature, all of them centered around the questions ‘What is water?’ and ‘What is a river?’, and, ultimately, ‘What is life?’ Interspersed throughout the book are so-called ‘Dead Body Reports,’ incredible and occasionally shocking stories of suicides and accidents whose secrets the river Thames will never reveal to us.

When I look at a map of London it’s hard to imagine a Thames that isn’t black. I mean the city is so enormous so thick and chaotic and deep. London seeps into the river. And invisibly the river seeps into the city. But you smell it. You definitely smell it.

Roni Horn’s new book is an extraordinary combination of poetic observation, lucidly precise critical thinking and beautifully suggestive images, transcending disciplines in order to explore the ways a natural phenomenon can represented and reflected. A profound feeling of longing and loss pervades these pages, adding a powerful emotional undercurrent to the images of the water’s perpetual change of light, color, and movement. An exceptionally accessible and narrative book that will seduce you to meditate on the basics of human existence.
The Thames River in London is the subject of this fine artists' book by American Roni Horn. The spiritual and physical force of water has long been of central interest in Horn's work, and for this volume she conjured up 47 enveloping images of the surface of the Thames. Text along the bottom of each page references events and poetry based on the famous river, as well as the "Dead Body Reports" collected from Scotland Yard,which detail accidents, murders and suicides that have occurred along the river.

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