Read Wes Anderson’s foreword for the Accidentally Wes Anderson photobook

Over 20 years of a pastel-hued career, Wes Anderson has defined for himself a singular aesthetic, from The Royal Tenenbaums to Grand Budapest Hotel and The Isle of Dogs – it’s retro and eye-pleasing, revelling in symmetry with faded grandeur and charming, vivid colour palettes. With awe-inspiring architecture and clean filmic cuts, his films teeter between the familiar and the whimsy, stranger than fiction but warm and enchanting.

The Instagram account @accidentallywesanderson, with over one million followers, has been curating photographs of real-life places that traverse the imaginary worlds of Anderson’s films for some time – think turquoise alleyways of Aveiro, the ‘Venice of Portugal’, and a butter yellow Odeon theatre in rural Texas that opened in 1928. Now, the visual adventure is being published as an expansive photobook. The fully authorised book is brought to us by the IG account’s founder, Wally Koval, and will detail the human stories behind each of the shots, with a foreword by the legendary filmmaker himself. 

In an exclusive snippet provided to Dazed, Wes Anderson writes: “The photographs in this book were taken by people I have never met, of places and things I have, almost without exception, never seen – but I must say: I intend to. Wally Koval and his collaborators have put together both a very entertaining collection of images and also an especially alluring travel guide (at least in the opinion of this actual Wes Anderson).”

You can see some exclusive imagery from the book for the first time in our gallery above – it features a Georgian hotel, a grand opera house, Egypt’s imposing Colossi of Memnon, the Pittsburgh Athletic Pool, and a Pancake hut in Croatia on a rainy day.

The photobook arrives in the lead up to Anderson’s highly anticipated new film, The French Dispatch. The film stars the likes of Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Elisabeth Moss, and many more film industry icons, capturing three storylines that intersect with the eponymous magazine in a fictional French town. The film – which is as gloriously symmetrical as you’d expect from its trailer, released back in February – is described in its official synopsis as “a love letter to journalists”. 

The book celebrates the aesthetic and carefully crafted artistic endeavours of the beloved filmmaker, in all its vibrant patterns and atypical settings – the images are predominantly new and never-before-seen, with a few fan faves from the Instagram page peppered throughout. As well as celebrating Anderson, it’s a tribute to the growing international community that has come together through their love of design, travel, photography, and of course, Anderson’s films.

Accidentally Wes Anderson, Wally Koval, will be published October 25 via Trapeze