The Overcoat is a group of 17 photographic works originally commissioned made for a for an artists republication of Nikolai Gogol’s classic novella published by Four Corners Books. The darkly humorous short novel (1842) tells of the life of a lowly and impoverished government clerk whose existence is briefly transformed by a new coat. For this new publication of the story Sarah Dobai produced a body of new photographic works that picture commercial vitrines in London and Paris. The photographs like the text reflect the confusion of surface appearance with reality that figures both in the story set in nineteenth century St Petersburg and on the city streets in London & Paris in the 21st Century.

The large format photographs, which were shot on film over several years aim to reflect on the language of commercial display and surface markers of status, consider commercial displays as a form of vernacular picture making, the glassed in rectangle of the vitrines referring back to the medium of photography.

EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW WITH FOUR CORNERS BOOKS ABOUT THE OVERCOAT :
Were the photographs used in this edition made as a direct response to the story?
Over time I began to think about the images I was making in relation to Gogol’s story. This way of relating photographs to bits of fiction writing was not a new thing for me. Previously I had made several pieces of work that used or referred to literature. I was interested in how my photographs of the vitrines would interact with Gogol’s writing. However I didn’t want to over-determine the reader’s experience of the interplay between the two. I see the text and the images as each having their own life though there may be moments in the book where the two seem to intersect quite intimately.

Tell us a little more about the images you created.
The photographs that feature in the book mainly record existing vitrines found on the streets of London and Paris. I was interested in treating these displays as a kind of vernacular picture-making that reflect people’s ideas about what a picture can be and what it can do. When I first started making this group of photographs the camera was quite pulled back, so that you could see the pavement and architecture around them. However as I carried on working, I moved much closer to the displays. I wanted to put the viewer and myself inside the constructed world of illusion that the vitrines depict. I shot most of the images for the book on a large format film camera. The slowness and attention to detail that those cameras require seemed to suit the making of the work and its re-framing of existing images.

Exhibitions of the photographs from The Overcoat have taken place at:
Glassyard Gallery, Budapest 11 November 2021 - January 25 2022
Link to video of exhibition walk through via gallery website.
Principles & Deception, Or Gallery, Vancouver 24 February - 24 March 2022
Breather, Laura Bartlett Gallery 25 November 2016 -15 January 2017
Principles & Deception, FILET, Murray Grove, London N1 13 May -June 2016
The Vanishing Point in History, L’ete Photographique de Lectoure, Gers France 18 July-23 Aug ‘15

Articles & Essays
Read an article about the book in Pylot Magazine. Read full text
Book review in PhotoMonitor. Read full text