Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World (Hardcover)

Author: Lewis Koch

Publisher: Borderland Books (2009)

Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual.

“Lewis Koch takes the weird world and makes it look real.”

–Barbara Crane

“Absolutely brilliant! A real trip down Memory Lane, Lover’s Lane, Tornado Alley, the Valley of the Dolls, Clowntown, Garages of the Damned, Flanders Fields, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Buddha Pest, Can’t Stop Now, Be Still, Get Well, Go to Hell, Hill and Dale, and Dullsville. Koch’s camera eye is like a fist that punches the daylights out of the nightmares we call life. His word pictures are the ransom note we write to death.”

–Michael William Doyle