And Then There Was the Night
by Magdalena Wysocka and Claudio Pogo
This extraordinary project began when artist duo Wysocka and Pogo stumbled upon a peculiar archive on eBay — a collection of handmade zines containing rephotographed images from a 1920s pornographic film. These enigmatic booklets, it later emerged, were privately made by the so-called “Vampire from Dachauer Moor”, an elusive figure from Münich’s occult scene of the 60s and 70s, whose story teeters on the boundary between myth and reality.
This cryptic discovery sparked a deeper investigation into the zines’ origin, setting the stage for the photobook’s haunting narrative. By recontextualizing the found zines and integrating them with archival material from different sources, the photobook transcends the realm of a traditional historical record, evolving into an exploration of identity, obscurity, and the power of narrative construction.
