American photographer Amani Willett reconstructs through a book the story of Joseph Plummer, a hermit who lived in the forests of New Hampshire at the end of the eighteenth century. Two centuries later, the same lands where Plummer lived were bought by the father of the photographer who didn’t know the story but in turn wanted to build a small hut to escape the rhythms of everyday life and take refuge in their own solitude.
Willett, intrigued by the figure of Plummer and the overlapping of stories and needs, began to investigate: from the few and uncertain news that he could find on some articles in local newspapers and personal notes Willett discovered that the man was born at the end of the eighteenth century in a small town in New Hampshire. He had ten or eleven brothers and came from a poor family. When he turned twenty he made the radical choice to leave the family and move to the woods surrounding his country where he managed to live in solitude until he was found dead in the shelter he had built (approximately 1860).
Alternating archival images that reconstruct and outline the story of Plummer and the places where he lived to images of his father and his life in that same place, Willett has built a visual story in which images of personal objects, historical documents, evocative momentos of the life of the father, elaborations of these same memories and moments, are arranged by a wise and suggestive direction in order to sketch a story that finds in the same American literary tradition curious echoes, by Henry Thoreau who in 1845, at the age of twenty-eight, left his hometown and goes to live on the shores of Lake Walden, in a hut built by himself, and he stays there for more than two years wishing “to march to the sound of a different drum” and seeks freedom by immersing himself in the rhythms of nature far from civilization (“Walden” is the autobiographical account of this experiment of solitary life, the daily chronicle of a return to simplicity, a declaration of independence from the moral weakness of a society dedicated to the accumulation of wealth), to Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski, also known as Unabomber who in 1971 moved to a hut in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived in an essential way with little money, without electricity and running water, feeding himself by hunting and mailing the his bombs that he justified in a manifesto, (Industrial Society and his Future), as an attempt to fight against what he considered the dangers of technological progress.