Nick Cave's Photobook 'Melancholy: The Little Book of Lost Gloves' Documents Discarded Gloves as Pandemic-Era Artifacts

Musician Nick Cave has released a photobook titled 'Melancholy: The Little Book of Lost Gloves' through his brand Cave Things. The self-published volume contains 100 Polaroid-style photographs taken with a phone app, capturing solitary gloves found on streets and in parks. Cave began the series in 2018 after seeing a lost glove on a street sign in Brighton, his hometown. During pandemic lockdowns, the project gained new resonance as solitary walks became a primary leisure activity. Each image is accompanied by location and date captions, revealing that pre-2020 photographs were taken across Europe and the US, while 2020 onward images remain mostly in Brighton and London. The collection documents a shift from knitted mitts and leather gloves to discarded rubber gloves, reflecting germaphobe concerns of recent times. Some photographs approach abstraction or recall cyanotypes, while others function as straightforward documentary images. Collectively, they form a typological meditation on loss, solitude, chance, and randomness during restricted movement. The book represents an archive of everyday objects similar to those appearing on many artists' social media accounts, though Cave chose the printed format over Instagram. The project connects to historical reflections on melancholy, referencing Robert Burton's 1621 work 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' and its therapeutic approach to the emotion.