Most buildings are experienced through their two-dimensional representations rather than in person, if at all. The book Watt or Fall contributes to discussions about the photographic voice of architectural space. Emerging from a year-long residency at Fallingwater (designed 1935, built 1936–39), artist Kate Joyce embraces the unreasonable task of photographing a building that defies its visual representation. Informed by the writing of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)—whose entire oeuvre presents meditations on the defeat of reason—Joyce limits her subject within the house to the intimate domestic space of Liliane Kaufmann’s bedroom. During spring, summer, fall, and winter we see myriad expressions of the bed, window, door, and fireplace within this bedroom. Concentrated into contiguous photographs, Beckett’s permutational language becomes a time-lapse of the infra-ordinary within Wright’s extraordinary creation. All rooms are witness to endless repetitions which language and photograph concentrate into unexpected patterns.

Kate Joyce is a photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of Metaphysics (Hat & Beard Press, 2022) and Big Ears Knoxville (Hat & Beard Press, 2019). Under the artist’s own imprint, Joyce published Metamorphoses (Special Problems Press, 2021) and Analogies (Special Problems Press, 2023). Her photographs are in Harper’s magazine, The New Yorker, Blau International, The Paris Review, Architect magazine, and housed in museum and library collections throughout the United States, among them the Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Museum of New Mexico Palace of the Governors, North Carolina Museum of Art, and Center for Creative Photography. Joyce was artist-in-residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in 2024–25 and is a resident artist at the Santa Fe Institute.