The Blindest Man: Feature for BJP

Buried in 1993 by writer and puzzle designer Régis Hauser, the golden owl has been puzzling treasure hunters for almost 30 years. Enigmatic and surreal, Graham’s latest book investigates the unsolved mystery.

Yvan, 2017 © Emily Graham.

Somewhere in France, a golden statuette of an owl is buried. It has lain waiting to be discovered since it was hidden in 1993 by writer and puzzle designer Régis Hauser. That same year, using the pseudonym Max Valentin, Hauser authored a cult book, On The Trail Of The Golden Owl, in which he detailed 11 riddle-like clues for finding the owl. In the intervening decades, thousands of treasure hunters have attempted it. None have succeeded. With Hauser now dead, the secret is held in the strictest confidence by his lawyer.

When photographer Emily Graham came across this story, she was intrigued. “I’d been thinking for a while about the subjectivity of looking and how the photographs I took were influenced by what I’d read about a place. I was looking for a way to frame that,” she says.

After immersing herself in the online communities of treasure hunters, Graham became “more and more curious”. In 2015, she headed to France to research the story. She met and interviewed searchers, following their sometimes contradictory routes across the country, searching for photographs along the way. “Letting my eye be led by the things that they had told me –  my experience of the landscapes encountered mediated and guided by their experience, their interpretations, encounters, miscalculations, dead ends,” she says.   

Each searcher had their own story. For some, it was an obsession; others had grown disillusioned. Some believe the owl is booby trapped or that the whole thing is a hoax. One man became so swept up in the hunt that he neglected his own family. Giddy with hope like a gambling addict, he felt sure that next time would be the time he’d strike lucky.

The Blindest Man by Emily Graham is published by VOID.