ulisse
ten books & field guide
2004-2013

ulisse is my long look at transformation. Made between 2004 and 2013 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the work began with photographs connected to the former Bethlehem Steel Works. Early in the process, I showed a group of prints to Ricardo Viera. He looked at them and said, “this is brilliant, you must pursue this.” What followed changed my relationship with photography itself, leading me toward a longer photographic form and a deeper understanding of my own work.

Over time, I realized the photographs were not really about a place, or about Bethlehem Steel itself. They were about transformation — and about my own shifting understanding of the world and myself. The work became less concerned with description and more concerned with experience, memory, and the act of looking.

Later, I was asked to consider photographing the former Homer Research Labs at Mountaintop. When I showed the prints to Lehigh University President Alice Gast, she later wrote to me, “Thank you, the way I look at things has changed.” It remains one of the most important responses I have ever received to my work.

Lehigh University exhibited ulisse through six solo exhibitions curated by Viera, culminating in a public dialogue between Gast and myself. More than 450 prints from the project are now held in Lehigh’s permanent collection. Work from ulisse is also held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Allentown Art Museum.

Realized as ten handmade books & field guide, ulisse gathers fragments of experience across time and place. Grounded in the American social-documentary tradition yet moving toward something more personal and inward, the work accepts transformation as a condition of being — where certainty dissolves, meanings shift, and the act of looking becomes inseparable from self-understanding.

Photographs, in rhythm, become a visual poem — a handmade book. ulisse becomes both object and document, evolving through time and form — creating a singular and fluid narrative shaped by change, accumulation, and reflection.

—theo anderson

making the books

Photographs are edited, sequenced, printed, and bound by my own hand, allowing the physical object to develop alongside the work itself. The making became inseparable from the photographs — a slower and more reflective process through which repetition, accumulation, and touch shaped my understanding of the work over time.

Produced in a small edition, each copy remains a distinct handmade object shaped by its moment of creation. ulisse exists not simply as a sequence of photographs, but as a meditation on transformation, memory, and the experience of looking.

structure

books
12 photographs per book
28 pages
10 × 8 inches
pigment prints on archival paper
bound by hand using double wire

box
title laser etched
recycled anodized aluminum
scratch resistant & archival
9 x 11.5 x 2 inches
signed & notated in field guide

origins
photographs made at bethlehem works
and the homer research laboratories

ulisse was an immigrant and crane
operator for bethlehem steel.

edition
seven unique copies
signed and notated in field guide
2026