In this week’s issue of the magazine, Richard Flanagan writes about David Walsh and his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Tasmania. The museum, founded in 2011 and now the biggest tourist attraction in Tasmania, is dedicated to themes of sex and death. “It seemed to me that MONA was a spaceship that had landed randomly in the middle of nowhere,” the photographer Ambroise Tézenas told me. Sent to photograph the museum, Tézenas sat across the bay from the looming structure his first morning there, thinking, “You must be a lunatic dreamer to build such a place… The location of the museum, its hugeness, the diversity and the disproportion of the collection cannot leave the visitor indifferent.” Tézenas also recalled the impression that Walsh had made on him: “The master of the house seemed silent and docile,” he said. “After asking me if I had what I needed, he vanished in the vastness of his strange creation.”

Here’s a look:





1 / 8 Chevron Chevron “Great Deeds Against the Dead” (1994), by Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Photographs by Ambroise Tézenas.