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 60’s and 70's, 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.

'In a time oversaturated with high-resolution clarity, algorithmic recommendations, and endless visual consumption, 'And Then There Was the Night' enacts a deliberate reversal—a movement into the shadow, into grain, into ambiguity. The work of Wysocka Magdalena and Claudio Pogo becomes a kind of visual incantation, summoning ghosts not to reveal truth, but to question the very desire for it. Their use of decayed, rephotographed zine material—originally culled from a nearly lost 1920s pornographic film—invokes an aesthetic of rupture. Rather than restoring the past, they mythologize it. The so-called Vampire from Dachauer Moor is not a character to be known, but to be felt—an unstable figure conjured from scraps, flickering at the edge of memory and imagination. Here, myth is resistance: to surveillance culture, to historical sanitisation, to the endless demand for legibility. In embracing the fragmented, the erotic, the obscure, the artists reclaim a visual space for slowness, for suspicion, for doubt. Where contemporary media insists on immediacy and exposure, this work luxuriates in concealment. Darkness is not absence here, but potential—the site where new, untameable narratives form. The night becomes a kind of radical archive: not to preserve, but to transform; not to show, but to suggest. The vampire, then, is less a monster than a medium—feeding not on blood, but on the forgotten textures of discarded imagery.' — Andrea Copetti / Tipi Bookshop