No Document

Author: Anwen Crawford

Publisher: Transit Books (2022)

A negative indexes the fullest set of possible solutions to the photograph that ends up being made, but being made, the photograph will frame a truth only the photograph contains. Disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. In a bold work by one of Australia’s leading writers, No Document is an exploration of loss in its many forms, embracing histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, and border policing. It is also an elegy for a friendship and artistic partnership cut short by death, an attempt to make a dear friend emerge from a field of memory, a document continuously emerging. Written out of the turmoil of grief, No Document shows how love, kinship, and resistance echo through time.

Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, and here she draws also on her background in poetry and visual art in a formally daring work of composition and collage. At once intimate and expansive, No Document reimagines the boundaries that divide us—as people, nations, and species—and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.