Another Happy Day: Found Photographs Collected by Jonah Samson

Another Happy Day is a compilation of anonymous, mostly black-and-white photographs found on eBay from the private collection of the Canadian artist, collector and writer Jonah Samson. Titled after a line from Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days ("This is going to be a happy day! ANOTHER HAPPY DAY"), the book can be read as an ironical or darkly humorous take on happiness, as its vintage imagery traverses the melancholy, the obscured, the forlorn and the preposterous. Throughout, sepia scenes of mildly homoerotic posturing, slapstick play or gymnastic antics mix freely with mistier, more sober imagery of obliterated faces and what seem to be long-forgotten moments and places, strung together along a carefully orchestrated narrative flow. Intimate in its production and feel, this handsome clothbound volume offers a warm-hearted paean to photographic history and life’s perpetual brevity.