In this book, Gerard Byrne brings together the culmination of ten years of research into the Loch Ness Monster, the myth fuelled in the 1930s by the popular press in order to sell newspapers. Appropriating formal conventions from the history of Land art that position landscape as the “other,” Byrne has compiled a series of images that deploy Loch Ness as a signifier for the enigmatic, the unreadable. Using both the populist literature spawned by the Loch Ness myth and the photographic material his own expeditions have yielded as “found material,” Byrne has developed a project both humorous and melancholic, that ultimately reflects a crisis of belief in the photographic image that has surfaced since the last heyday of Loch Ness interest in the 1970s.

In this book, Gerard Byrne brings together the culmination of ten years of research into the Loch Ness Monster, the myth fuelled in the 1930s by the popular press in order to sell newspapers. Appropriating formal conventions from the history of Land art that position landscape as the “other,” Byrne has compiled a series of images that deploy Loch Ness as a signifier for the enigmatic, the unreadable. Using both the populist literature spawned by the Loch Ness myth and the photographic material his own expeditions have yielded as “found material,” Byrne has developed a project both humorous and melancholic, that ultimately reflects a crisis of belief in the photographic image that has surfaced since the last heyday of Loch Ness interest in the 1970s.