Pictures & Prose gathers talks delivered through Melbourne’s existentialist and atheist circles and places them alongside Raffaella Torresan’s ink portraits of the speakers.

The result is less a conventional philosophy reader than a visual archive of people thinking aloud: sceptics, apostates, rationalists and independent intellectuals working through questions of religion, freedom, meaning, science, morality and belief without the disinfected atmosphere of an academic department.

The essays range widely. Contributors discuss the origins of common law, apostasy from Islam, scepticism and scientism, the relation between atheism and existentialism, and the practical risks attached to rejecting inherited faith. The writing is uneven in the productive way such collections often are: these are public talks rather than polished theoretical monuments, shaped by personal history, argument and the particular pressure of speaking before a room. Torresan’s drawings preserve that setting. Speakers appear with papers, microphones, coffee cups and books—the furniture of thought before it is tidied into doctrine.

Torresan is a Melbourne painter, printmaker and photographer who attended and sketched presenters at meetings of the Existentialist Society; this volume compiles those drawings with the talks themselves. It is a peculiar and appealing piece of local intellectual history: philosophy not as a canon of dead authorities, but as something conducted by actual bodies in suburban rooms, vulnerable to disagreement, obsession, bad lighting and the occasional cup of tea.

Green Door Publishing, Ballarat, 2019 paperback. Light shelf wear; clean and firmly bound.