In 2005, my friend David Naugle took me aside at a party in the West Village to show me scans he’d made of photographs by his upstate neighbor, Mark Hogancamp. David had befriended Mark after noticing him walking up and down their road on the outskirts of Kingston, New York, dressed in World War II military garb and pulling along a small model jeep filled with military figurines. The photographs were incredible—richly cinematic, beautifully lit and composed, intensely strange. Mark’s story was just as extraordinary. To help himself recover physically and emotionally from a brutal attack that had left him in a coma, he had built from scrap wood a one-sixth-scale town he called Marwencol and populated it with dolls. This image is from a photo by David, taken the first time I visited Mark with him that summer. I was proud to debut Mark’s work in Esopus 5 (Fall 2005), and that following summer, I curated a show of his photographs at White Columns. In 2011, Esopus subscriber Jeff Malmberg made a wonderful documentary, Marwencol, that brought Mark’s story to even more people. The audience for Mark’s work expanded exponentially when Welcome to Marwen, a feature film based on the documentary—directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Steve Carell as Mark—was released in 2018.