CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/1/2016

The Night Climbers of Cambridge

Featured image is reproduced from The Night Climbers of Cambridge, The Archive of Modern Conflict's upgraded "reprint" of a 1937 cult publication documenting the nocturnal exploits of a group of university renegades who spent their pre-war evenings climbing the facades of campus buildings (with early photographic equipment in tow). In the current incarnation—featuring a fuzzy, embossed midnight-black flocked cover and bound-in facsimile photographs with original hand-written and typed notes on back—the super-dark, full-bleed reproductions (now in the collection of French artist-provocateur Thomas Mailaender) present "a secret, romantic creature, like a character from Buchan 'crossing a Scottish moor on a stormy night,'" according to photography historian Ian Jeffrey. "Mailaender… identifies the night-climber as a prototype—a wary traveller, mixing with others whilst attempting to make his way across a chancy terrain without much in the way of rules or etiquette."