| Travelers is compelling because its visual scenarios are consistently foreboding and disturbing. The artists have gutted the innocence of snow globes and their childlike panoramas and reinvented them as portals to dark fantasies, like dream or fairytale settings gone dangerously awry. Muñoz explains, “There are storylines that run through some of the globes that connect them together. We have explored themes for periods of time and we were influenced by things that were happening in this country, or in the area where we lived, or in our lives.” Using Martin and Muñoz’s imagery as a reference point, award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem contributes the three-part short story, Traveler Home, as the text for the book. | 
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Milton Fletcher is director and curator of CyberGallery66.org.
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Traveler 132 at Night, from Travelers, 2004. Published by Aperture, October 2008. Courtesy of Aperture.We look for work that really has something to say, that is very consistent, well developed, challenging, and will operate well in the book format. We will take a gamble in a way that a lot of publishers might not be able to, in part because of our not-for-profit status. We can find ways to make it work. (Lesley A. Martin, Publisher, Aperture Books)
And so it is with Aperture’s release of the book Travelers, a selected collection of photographs of visual artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz’s self-made snow globes series, Travelers, and the micro-scale Islands panorama series. Travelers is compelling because its visual scenarios are consistently foreboding and disturbing. The artists have gutted the innocence of snow globes and their childlike panoramas and reinvented them as portals to dark fantasies, like dream or fairytale settings gone dangerously awry.
Muñoz explains, “There are storylines that run through some of the globes that connect them together. We have explored themes for periods of time and we were influenced by things that were happening in this country, or in the area where we lived, or in our lives.”
Using Martin and Muñoz’s imagery as a reference point, award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem contributes the three-part short story, Traveler Home, as the text for the book. It is a curious tale with ominous overtones that has a surprisingly benign ending—in stark contrast to Martin and Muñoz’s usually dark implications. Lethem’s approach illustrates how one artist can reshape the subject matter of other artist’s and takes it in another direction.
Martin and Muñoz create their settings using plumbers’ epoxy, miniature train figures (which are about a quarter-inch high), water, alcohol, and silicate for snowflakes. Muñoz photographs the work using a medium format Mamiya camera and edits the various negatives together on a computer to create and finish the composite image from which prints are made.
Martin and Muñoz describe how Travelers came together as a book, “We were approached by Aperture. Initially, they asked us if we’d be interested in doing a children’s book and we said no, even though children love the globes, because children are very attracted to dark stories. Aperture came back with a proposal to basically document the work we’ve been doing for the last five years (2002-2007), which is a series of travelers, almost 200. They had seen that the work had evolved and grown and become richer and they thought that there was enough material to do a book.”
The danger with books is that you can have this certain amount of redundancy and actually deaden the experience or the power of the work if it doesn’t change up and develop during the course of the book; we didn’t want that deadness to happen.
Aperture’s approach was to not make it as a typical art book—with an art critic’s or an art historian’s comments—but to continue with the spirit of the work into the text. That was a pretty original idea.”
Travelers book editor Joanna Lehan: “We all realized the work lent itself beautifully to the narrative space of a book, and that the book could reach beyond their considerable fine-art fan base. For Travelers, I suggested an initial format, edit, and sequence to the artists, got Jonathan Lethem involved, and hired a designer, Patricia Fabricant, and worked with them all to get to something everyone liked.”
Thus, it was this intensive open-minded collaboration between the artists and the publishing team that ultimately allows Aperture to add Travelers to its long list of fascinating books.
