Book Review Gong Co. Photographs by Christian Patterson Reviewed by Blake Andrews “Photography has a Vishnu complex. While regular folks are blithely content to let people and moments fade into the past, photographers want to preserve them. That urge kicks into high gear when destruction looms..."

Gong Co. by Christian Patterson.

Gong Co.
Photographs by Christian Patterson
TBW Books & Éditions Images Vevey, 2024. 224 pp., 164 color plates, 9x11".

Photography has a Vishnu complex. While regular folks are blithely content to let people and moments fade into the past, photographers want to preserve them. That urge kicks into high gear when destruction looms. Raise your hand if you’ve ever photographed an old building scheduled for demolition, a patch of nature before development into a subdivision, a rusting antique car, or birthday candles about to be blown out. To photograph is to freeze time, locking the present into the historical record. We capture reality like a bug trapped in amber. Vishnu (The “Preserver” in Hinduism) would approve.

For photographer Christian Patterson, the amber bug bit hard on a 2003 road trip through the Mississippi Delta. During a short stop in the small town of Merigold, an old brick building stirred his curiosity. It housed a family-owned store with the name painted on the side in all-caps: THE GONG CO. Patterson took some photographs and made a mental note of the location. Over the next several years he returned multiple times to poke around and take more pictures. Each visit, he found the store in worse shape than before. Its shelves stored a dusty museum of old merchandise. Did it actually sell anything? Who knew. Eventually, on a stop in 2013, he found the business closed for good. By that point Patterson had arranged private access through the owner. He continued to photograph in and around The Gong Co. until 2019 when the interior was finally gutted.

After a few years of editing, sequencing, and production tweaks, Patterson has released his findings as a photo monograph. Gong Co.’s co-publishers TBW and Éditions Images Vevey describe it as “a monumental memento mori to the decline and decay of a family-owned grocery store.” That’s a fair portrayal. But there’s a fine line between memento mori and ruin porn, as Patterson would be the first to admit. His shopworn photographs hang somewhere in the balance between the two poles, a precarious stance which lends them visual punch.

Before seeing any photos, Gong Co. puts the reader in a bygone mood with clever design features. For starters, the dust jacket has the texture and color of a brown paper sack. The simulacrum effect is enhanced with faux grocery stickers, masking tape, and a grimy hand print. Pulling back the jacket’s exterior folds — adorned with phrases like “Perishable”, “1978”, and “Going Out Of Business” — we uncover photos of stock items from yesteryear’s retail world, amid warnings about procrastination. Images of an air freshener, old-school pull tab, and fly swatter cast a swampy Delta spell. The book’s outer cover plays along. It’s a clothbound green facsimile, seemingly sun faded, thread worn and dog-eared. The endpapers recycle a floral pattern which recalls fifties wallpaper. By all initial appearances Gong Co. could pass for an ancient tome on a neglected bookshelf somewhere, perhaps in a small-town Mississippi shop?

Once past the end pages, the photos begin in earnest, and they continue without letup until the coda. Their sequence follows Patterson’s twenty year path of discovery in bite-sized frames, gradually penetrating from the store’s exterior into its private innards. A rear index charts the trajectory with helpful captions (a good page to study before diving into the photos). Image by image we trace Patterson’s investigations from Highway 61 to Merigold’s town streets, then further into the store’s main space, back rooms, office, and the owner’s home before, inexorably, Gong Co. is finally Going, Going, Gone.

Patterson’s visual style is neutral throughout. It’s a lazy day in the Delta. He’s in no hurry. He can’t quite decide if he should share his secret discovery in broad chunks, or compose it into abstract compositions. Most photos fall into one camp or the other, some into both. For general context, a handful of sweeping interior views of The Gong Co.’s inventory are very helpful. They’re photographed in turn facing N, S, E, and W. The place is a wreck. Peeling paint, displaced products, and debris-strewn aisles signal years of inattention.

Patterson spices these broad views with dozens of closely cropped subjects. Some photos isolate consumer goods and signs, recalling the odd artifactual interjections of Redheaded Peckerwood. Others take a more symbolic approach, blending shadow, shape, and color into visual chiaroscuros. We sense the eerie presence of humans throughout, but it’s subtle. Surely someone must have built and cared for this place at one point. But no actual people appear in the book apart from a few modeled hands. Despite the bright tonality of the book’s coated images, their take-home message is clear. The Gong Co. is a forlorn and forgotten backwater indeed.

If this were just another photobook of decrepit shop scenes — old barn photos, anyone? — I might be tempted to dismiss it as ruin porn and move on. What makes Gong Co. noteworthy is its novel design. In fact, few photobooks can match Gong Co.’s memento mori artifice. I’ve already described the dated cover features, but the main body of the book takes nostalgic homage to another level entirely. The interior pages are speckled with pre-imposed stains, smudge marks, and penciled notes. Some of them whisper “Mystery…” or “To open a store is easy…” The blemishes are faint at first, almost invisible. But they become more pronounced as the book progresses. Fake grease stains seep through multiple sections, a perfect semblance of maltreatment. Spill a few drops of beer on this book? No problem. They’ll blend right in. Feel free to handle with oiled palms too. When Gong Co. is viewed sideways, the spatterings present themselves in force. The page edges are mildewed with browning age marks, as if it was left in a damp place and forgotten a while. For a book about a fading institution, there is no better way to drive the point home.

This isn’t the first time that Patterson has pushed the photobook envelope, nor will it likely be the last. Redheaded Peckerwood broke open the multifarious dam on a generation of photo monographs, while Bottom of the Lake modeled itself after an old phone book. Both were innovative, but Gong Co. might be his most convincing trick yet. I’ve paged through it several times, and I can’t find a weakness in its senescent illusion. It looks, feels, and acts like an aging book. If only it had a mildewed smell, the ruse would be complete. Such a trait might be beyond publishing capability, at least for now. But who knows what the future holds. As Gong Co. proves, the passing of time can unlock many mysteries.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Sex. Death. Transcendence. Photographs by Linda Troeller Reviewed by Juliette Melia "You can’t have missed it. Edgy and eye-catching, Linda Troeller’s frontispiece shows her on all fours, bottom bared, ready to accept a lover doggy-style. Her vulva is facing away from us, and indeed, better leave it to our imagination in our pornified society. Vertical, almond- shaped, glistening in its jungle of dark eyelashes, suggestively resting on the floral bedspread (flowers are the sex organs of plants, Robert Mapplethorpe once famously said), the artist’s eye replaces it, a female gaze in all its subversive reversal..."

Sex. Death. Transcendence. By Linda Troeller.

Sex. Death. Transcendence.
Photographs by Linda Troeller
Reviewed by Juliette Melia

TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024. 96 pp., 48 color / 11 duotone plates, 9x13".

Gender, sexuality, desire... Sex.

You can’t have missed it. Edgy and eye-catching, Linda Troeller’s frontispiece shows her on all fours, bottom bared, ready to accept a lover doggy-style. Her vulva is facing away from us, and indeed, better leave it to our imagination in our pornified society. Vertical, almond- shaped, glistening in its jungle of dark eyelashes, suggestively resting on the floral bedspread (flowers are the sex organs of plants, Robert Mapplethorpe once famously said), the artist’s eye replaces it, a female gaze in all its subversive reversal.

With its flashlit, snapshot aesthetics, this self-portrait is reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s work about her and her friends’ intimacy, or of Natasha Merritt’s, who uses her own body and sexuality in her very erotic self-portraits. Troeller’s sexual coming-of-age coincided with the sexual revolution, which may explain why she revels in her seductiveness and her sexuality. The fetishism inherent in the kneeling neck brace picture has already been noted by Darcey Steinke. There is also fetishism in the full-bodied bandages picture – who doesn’t want to unwrap this gift – or in the arm’s length photograph of Troeller’s younger self in which she looks at the viewer in a seductively defiant gaze, her neck adorned with a black ribbon tantalizingly contrasting with her white skin.

The high erotic load of Troeller’s self-portrait is heightened by the fact that they are of a woman, by a woman, in a feminist rewriting of the naked-or-nude debate. For celebrity art critic Kenneth Clark in the 1950s, the naked body was huddled and defenseless, associated to embarrassment, and could only become a glorified nude through the mediation of the artist’s talented hand, thanks to which the female body could become balanced, prosperous and confident. The gendered aspect of the process is unmistakable: the embarrassing and embarrassed female body is here to be given a proper artistic form by the male artist. This gendered view is also inherent in Marxist art theorist John Berger’s discussion of the same topic twenty years later: the ideal spectator is still supposed to be male, the image of woman is still aimed at arousing him, although Berger is critical of the power imbalance between the two genders. When Troeller represents herself not only naked but sexualized, she empowers herself and her viewers to take charge of their own representation, even in the vulnerable position that is the desired and desiring body.

Beauty norms, the ageing female body... Death.

The 1746 painting Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty by Pompeo Batoni insists on the horror, the violence, of an old woman (Old Age of course has to be a crone) scratching the face of the allegory of Beauty (a young woman in swathes of pink material in case you pictured a young Adonis). Time, a winged male figure, oldish according to his hair but with a still muscular body, guides the hag’s hand with his imperious finger. The painter’s rendition of old age is probably meant to induce horror: the wrinkled, saggy neck, the sunken eyes, the gnarly fingers standing out against Beauty’s rosy cheek. The latter’s expression, however could be that of Troeller upon discovering her first chin hair. Curious. Unphased. Expectant, even.

Old age and the impending mortality it evokes has often been a taboo in the representation of the female body. But overcoming this taboo is a challenge that Troeller’s nude self-portraits fully take up. In The Naked Nude, Frances Borzello’s analysis of female nudes by female artists, we are reminded that in the 1970s, the second wave of feminism was in its heyday and that female artists consequently wanted to take back control of their representation, mainly by sharing the full subjectivity of their experiences. For Troeller, ageing is part and parcel of this subjective experience, and the representation of her ageing female body is the crux of her work. It brings to mind Clarke’s now outdated reservations about the status of nude photography in art, because of photography’s inability to erase the wrinkles, pouches, and other skin blemishes, that might remind the (male) viewer of the humanity of the (female) model. Those reservation are outdated but, I think, still influential if we consider modern communication, be it only advertisement that still uses a majority of young, white, slim, able- bodied female bodies. I can hear Troeller from here, along with other female photographers representing their or other people’s old age, like Mélanie Blanchot or Elinor Carucci, scoffing at Clarke’s retrograde ideas. Her wrinkles, the stains and folds on her skin, are exactly what make her work interesting, because it shows, through the inexorable advance of the years on her body, her philosophical acceptance of death.

Immanence, the divine, potentiality... Transcendence.

Confidently did I set about explaining the sex and the death present in Linda Troeller’s self- portraits, but transcendence is a whole different ballgame. It is a potent philosophical concept that has been defined and redefined, sometimes contradictorily, by several philosophers, and I worry that my feeble attempts will not do full justice to Heidegger or Jankélévitch’s reasoning. Usually, transcendence is all about (wo)man’s relationship to God, because the divine transcends, that is to say goes beyond, our daily experience. Like sex and ageing, the divine is also part and parcel of Troeller’s work. Often, it seems to me, ironically. The divine magic of the diffracted sunbeam sending a rainbow on her face, also reminiscent of the gay flag. The Madonna on the ring of the hand that is also in a position of chokehold on the neck. The torn holy pictures, with an uncanny similarity in the saint’s and Troeller’s eye colour, making us wonder why there are so few images of older women in religious imagery? Could it be the same logic as in advertising and its perpetual reuse of standardized female bodies and faces? There is also the plaster angel, their forever young face chipped and bruised contrasting with Troeller’s, looking aged but ever so strong and resilient.

The definition of transcendence I cherish is the one I take from Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. For her, you reach transcendence when you are not prevented, by society, others, yourself even, to reach your full potential. You study, love, create, laugh, travel, whatever you fancy, as much as you can or want, and the results are fulfilling for you. I feel that this aspect of transcendence corresponds with Troeller’s self-portraits: not the social norms and taboos, nor personal shame or guilt, could prevent her from offering us this beautiful trajectory of a woman living, loving, and ageing, on her own terms.

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xxx

Juliette Melia is a French lecturer and a researcher. She teaches English Communication at la Sorbonne and the history of American art at the ICP in Paris. Her writings mainly focus on the representation of minorities in photography. What matters to her is when an artist pushes the boundaries of what was, so far, accepted as a proper subject for art.

Book Review My Mother, My Son Photographs by Mary Frey Reviewed by Brian Arnold "I want to start by saying that I’ve been unable to learn much about artist Selina Kudo, short of an installation she composed for the Tanks Art Centre in Australia in 2022 (a conceptual piece about backyard trampolines)..."

My Mother, My Son. By Mary Frey.

My Mother, My Son
Photographs by Mary Frey

TBW Books, Oakland, CA 2024. 72 pp., 12 color / 21 duotone plates, 12x10".

"I was becoming alive to certain essential qualities in family photographs. Above all I admired what the camera made. The whole person was presented to the camera. There was no interference, or so it seemed. And sometimes the frame cut through the world with a surprise. There could be no doubt that the picture belonged more to the world of things and facts than to the photographer."

— Emmet Gowin

I am of the belief that Emmet Gowin deserves credit for bringing the family album to discussions of fine art photography. He certainly wasn’t the first artist to photograph his family — many of the Pictorialist photographers like Clarence White worked almost solely with their families, and Emmet’s mentor Harry Callahan made remarkable photographs of his wife and daughter — but somehow Emmet changed things. His photographs are often arcane and layered with thick metaphysical questions, but he also photographed Christmas morning, family camping trips, and his children at play in the backyard. These pictures in turn influenced generations of new photographers, including Sally Mann, Tina Barney, and Doug Dubois.

Enter Mary Frey, an artist who again challenges distinctions between fine art and family albums. Frey is an incredibly interesting photographer whose work has come to light late in her career. After completing an MFA at Yale University in 1979 (just missing Walker Evans), Frey spent the next decades teaching at the Hartford Art School and making pictures of her family. Her first book, Reading Raymond Carver in 2017, was an immediate favorite in photobook publishing. Since then, Frey has published two more monographs, Real Life Dramas (with an essay by Tim Carpenter) and now My Mother, My Son. Like her contemporary Peggy Nolan, Frey brilliantly demonstrates that a relentless, unflinching look at our most banal selves — little league games, high school dances, garden snakes and pet rabbits, a first bb gun, Bruce Lee movies, and a flat tire on a blinged up Schwinn 5-speed — can show complex ideas about being a middle-class American during the Reagan and Clinton years.

Published by TBW, My Mother, My Son is presented as nothing more than an album. The front cover has a classic photo of Americana tipped-in by its corners; it’s a young man wearing a ¾ sleeved t-shirt and Adidas Stan Smiths, taking aim with his new rifle, as the photographer’s shadow is cast across the bottom left corner. It reminds me of pictures I saw in family albums when I worked at the Colorado History Museum in the 1990s, no different than Brownie photographs of hunters trying out their new goods in the backyards of Beuna Vista, CO, the same shadow of the photographer cast in the lower corner of the frame. Inside Frey’s album, however, we see something much more sophisticated; the intimacies of an ordinary New England family, played out against the backdrop of the repressive years of Reagan pitted against the scandals of Bill Clinton, striving to find themselves.

The book is composed of 33 photographs — both color and black-and-white — with just one image per page spread. Most of the pictures feature boys or young men, presumedly her children, with some photographs of other family members, neighbors, and friends. Frey’s photographs are beautifully executed and superbly reproduced in the book. I grew up in the 1980s-90s, and there are many signifiers in the book that seem familiar, be it the home décor or clothing found throughout the pictures. Just as importantly, the life she documents is true to many of us, a simple middle-class American existence.

I do have one minor criticism of Frey’s photographs in this book — her use of flash feels a little stale at times. I’ll offer the guess that when she uses strobe, it’s a small-ish camera mounted flash, she isn’t experimenting with the more even illumination of ring flash or connecting the lights off the camera body for my elusive effects. I do feel this approach to strobe lighting can appear brutal and clinical, not ideas that I feel best support or characterize Frey’s pictures.

Regardless, My Mother, My Son is worth the time (like most TBW publications). It is a meditation on motherhood, illustrating Frey’s investigation of what it means to raise boys. Through her lens, we watch her sons negotiate puberty, play, masculinity, learning to define themselves. As far as I can tell, we only see Frey’s mother one time, and it is the last photograph in the book. She appears frail and vulnerable, unable to take care of herself; Frey’s son carries her across the threshold into her own bedroom, and her death feels imminent. It’s a poignant image, and helps the reader situate Frey in the narrative; the pictures of her children really chronicle her own passage of time, surmised as we see the photographer’s mother on the verge of passing away, carried gently by the changing lineage of family.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review Dead Ringer Photographs by Yael Eban & Matthew Gamber Reviewed by Blake Andrews “It’s no secret that the world is awash in photographs. The current image glut fills every conceivable vacuum, mostly via screens. This may seem like a condition of the times, but before this wave came an analogue precursor. The early 20th century enjoyed its own photographic Big Bang, as cameras, film, and print technologies became widely accessible and affordable for the first time..."

Dead Ringer. By Yael Eban & Matthew Gamber.

Dead Ringer
Photographs by Yael Eban & Matthew Gamber
TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024. 120 pp., 95 plates, 9x12".

It’s no secret that the world is awash in photographs. The current image glut fills every conceivable vacuum, mostly via screens. This may seem like a condition of the times, but before this wave came an analogue precursor. The early 20th century enjoyed its own photographic Big Bang, as cameras, film, and print technologies became widely accessible and affordable for the first time. Small photographs, postcards, and drugstore snapshots spewed off in all directions like primordial particles. The aftershocks still reverberate today in flea markets, albums, garage sales, and basement boxes.

These physical materials have provided the grist for numerous found-photo curations. Anonymous snapshots have been collected into books of all shapes and sizes, and the pace seems to have picked up with the new millennium. But to date none have yet taken the approach of Matthew Gamber and Yael Eban. Both authors have extensive experience as photo archivists. Together they’ve spent the past seven years scavenging anonymous snapshots from various sources.

So far so good. But their collaborative book Dead Ringer offers a twist on the found photo genre. Unlike previous curations, this one is organized into pairings grouped by origin. Each set features multiple prints spawned from a single negative. These identical twins (plus a few triplets and quartets) were separated at birth, then made their way through the world over the course of decades. Through the remarkable efforts of Eban and Gamber — how in the world did they track down and match all these snapshots? — they’ve been reunited. Pictures respond to destiny, the photo version of quantum entanglement.

As one might expect, some twins bear closer family resemblance than others. In the book’s opening pages, the pairings are literally dead ringers. With no introductory text, initial mountainscapes and city skylines pose a quandary to the reader. What exactly are we looking at and why has the same photo seemingly been printed twice? The riddle resolves in the pages to follow, as minor physical artifacts begin to delineate clear differences. One print is slightly larger than its twin. Another shows handwriting. Another print seems to have been left in the sun too long, for its colors do not match its sibling. Just as with human twins, events gradually leave their marks. The singularity devolves to individuals.

For readers, these minor tics and baubles prove to be quite stimulating. After we’ve been put on alert to look for small differences, they seem to crop up everywhere. Photos sport punctures, tears, stains, notes, commercial banners, and more. The eye moves between pairings searching for discrepancies, and Dead Ringer becomes a treasure hunt not entirely dissimilar from the act of photography. In the words of Todd Hido, it’s “one of those rare books that forces you to stop in your tracks and set aside all distractions in order to deeply look at the details of the images contained within.”

Dead Ringer’s no-frills design lets the photographs do most of the work. It’s an open-spine body wrapped in an unbleached paper dust jacket. If the cover had a separated-at-birth twin, it might be a brown paper grocery bag. The photos are reproduced at actual size and finish, paired across double spreads with scars intact. Broad white pages provide plenty of room for detailed snooping. After all the photographs have been digested and decoded, Clément Chéroux chimes in with an anecdotal afterword. “Photography….seems to have been born under the sign of Gemini,” he notes in a roaming digression that broaches genetics, overshadowed twins, Talbot, Benjamin, and Arbus. Coming after an entirely visual feast, the essay is a nice intellectual dessert. It fits the photos so well they might have been separated at birth.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes Photographs by Tarrah Krajnak Reviewed by Britland Tracy “I leaf through the fleshy end sheets that preface Tarrah Krajnak’s Master Rituals II: Edward Weston, struck with the realization that, on purpose, I have navigated adult life in the photo world with a now-conspicuous dearth of knowledge of almost all things Edward Weston..."

Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes. 

By Tarrah Krajnak.

Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes
Photographs by Tarrah Krajnak
TBW Books, Oakland, 2022. In English. 52 pp., 10x13½".

I leaf through the fleshy end sheets that preface Tarrah Krajnak’s Master Rituals II: Edward Weston, struck with the realization that, on purpose, I have navigated adult life in the photo world with a now-conspicuous dearth of knowledge of almost all things Edward Weston. Here is what I recall upon opening this book:

1. He kept his apertures small in the camera and tonal ranges large in the darkroom, and the history books all thank him for it.
2. He photographed the curves of a bell pepper like those of a woman, and vice-versa.

One can imagine that in Weston’s World, a bell pepper is perhaps the platonic ideal of a photographic subject: malleable, smooth but not shiny, organically contoured, inert yet anthropomorphic in the right light, at the right angle. It comes in a variety of skin tones: yellow, orange, red, green. And if it droops, wilts, rots, bruises, or was not a very appealing piece of produce in the first place, its fresher replacement is just a garden or grocery away. (I recently learned that, once his vegetal subjects began to sag, he ate them.) Parallel comparisons to portraits of faceless nude women from the last century are not hard lines to draw here.

Tarrah Krajnak reimagines herself as both bell pepper-woman and master-Weston through her series of seventeen black-and-white, large format, nude self-portraits, methodically sequenced on the right side of each spread with the gravitas of a twentieth-century virtuoso’s monograph — a formality that subverts this book’s exquisitely sardonic tone. She reincarnates the exact gestures of his female models (whose names, for historical record, were Charis Wilson and Bertha Wardell) in suspended animations of “bent over” and “holding ankle” and “standing from behind”. She employs materials outside the confines of herself and her camera as both assistants and partitions — cinder blocks, hefty rocks, white foam core board, plywood plinths — and often present in her images are Weston’s own portraits of fragmented women, lingering on the periphery as visual references. His legacy as a canonical photographer is relegated to instructional prop; Krajnak clicks the shutter.

This is how she lets us in on the joke, unveiling the smoke and mirrors of the medium through her own photographic mastery. She reveals the shutter release cord, the contortions required to simultaneously fragment choice curves of the body and compose the frame with self-possessed agency. Some photographs are printed directly onto the page as darkroom test strips, illuminating the extent to which her shadows and highlights can be manipulated — a decision fatigue which silver gelatin loyalists know all too well. With this fourth wall broken, Weston suddenly seems much less rarified.

There is an accelerating indignation in Master Rituals II that crescendos in what is plausibly the greatest centerfold-odalisque-reclining nude of all time, as Krajnak sprawls verso to recto against sheets of plywood and a fanned, spikey houseplant, armored with just a gas mask and an insubordinate gaze. After nearly a dozen portraits depicting a bended knee here and a twisted torso there, the curtain is pulled back on their maker. At last, a face. The face of a Peruvian-born, indigenous woman staring back at the camera while her presence is implied behind it. This picture is an outlier in that it reproaches nothing specific to Weston’s portfolio but rather all that is white, colonizing and heteronormative in the history of art about women idealized by men. It’s Guerrilla Girls-meets-Venus of Urbino.

The gas mask comes off in the final self-portrait, but Krajnak’s eye contact remains. She crosses her limbs but faces the camera. Her raised arm grips the shutter release and hovers above one last pair of Weston portraits: another contorted woman cropped at the neck on the left, and on the right, angled slightly away from the camera — what’s that? — the unmistakable Bell Pepper No. 30.

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Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.

Book Review River's Dream Photographs by Curran Hatleberg Reviewed by Brian Arnold "I think most readers associate novelist Cormac McCarthy with his renditions of the American West, found in his iconic novels All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. Fewer know that McCarthy’s early works were all set in the American South, and create a vision much more akin to William Faulkner, including novels Child of God, Outer Dark and Suttree..."

River's Dream By Curran Hatleberg.

River's Dream
Photographs by Curran Hatleberg

TBW Books, Oakland, USA, 2022. 152 pp., 65 color plates, 11.5x13.5″".

I think most readers associate novelist Cormac McCarthy with his renditions of the American West, found in his iconic novels All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. Fewer know that McCarthy’s early works were all set in the American South, and create a vision much more akin to William Faulkner, including novels Child of God, Outer Dark and Suttree. Many critics and devotes of McCarthy cite the latter, Suttree, as the writer’s greatest work. Interpreted as an autobiographical story set in rural Tennessee, the book is about a man named Suttree, an outcast who lives along the margins of society in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Estranged from his mother named Grace, Suttree’s life is told in a dream-like narrative of Biblical proportions. The twists and turns of the Tennessee River offer a metaphorical and allegorical backdrop for the story. The surface of the water and flow of the river perfectly mimick his life, steadily moving forward, but no two ripples exactly the same. Through the course of the novel, Suttree is revealed as the best kind of antihero, equally driven by compassion, wisdom, estrangement and anger.

Suttree is also Curran Hatleberg’s Instagram handle (@_suttree_), and as such provides an interesting entry point for understanding the photographs in Curran Hatleberg’s book River’s Dream, published by TBW Books. Photographed in the deep south, largely in northern Florida, River’s Dream depicts communities on the edge of civilization, places along the water where alligators and water snakes have as much say over the land as any human. And similar to Suttree, Hatleberg repeats specific Biblical themes; for McCarthy it was the mother Grace, for Hatleberg, the serpent that tempted our fall.

The sequencing of the book is lovely. The opening picture, quite literally, invites the reader through the doorway of a local home, into the private worlds of the people Hatleberg photographs (albeit we are greeted by a dog’s behind). Using different sequencing strategies, from formal juxtapositions to film-like sequences, in which we watch a scene unfold over several page spreads, the narrative leads us into a community characterized by rich social connections, racial divides, broken homes, simple pleasures, environmental trauma, and the lives of people who experience more poverty than opportunity. The final picture closes the narrative as clearly as the doorway opened it, depicting a still and stagnant marshland (we see a picture of this same marsh earlier in the book with a photograph of an alligator scurrying away from the photographer, deeper into the water), a body of water as murky as it is foreboding.

Serpents — whether water snakes or alligators — are abundant in Hatleberg’s book, grounding the entire narrative in the temptation that led to our ruin. Throughout River’s Dream, we see serpents handled lovingly like pets, gutted and crammed into a meat freezer, their shed skins collected as trophies, hiding in the grass waiting for unsuspecting prey and slithering around the family swimming pool or bathtub. It’s hard to find one clear idea behind these pictures, as the serpent is depicted as both predator and prey, an adored pet and keeper of our fears, but collectively they pose interesting questions about our temptations and fall from grace.

The book includes two essays, one by novelist Joy Williams, a part-time resident of northern Florida, and the other by Natasha Trethewey, two-term poet laureate of the United States (2012-2014). William’s essay is well-written but unsurprising. However Trethewey’s essay “Love, Illuminating,” provides some interesting ideas about the languages of dreams and poetry, and how these can help us to better understand photographs. Trethewey notes unique attributes of poetry, specifically the sort of wordplay often used to make meaning by comparing like sounds or word roots, and the arcane pictorial landscape of dreams, often obscure but rich with meaning and insight. She suggests these two languages can converge in a photograph, that like poetic language, photographs forms can suggest associations that surprise us, and like dreams, the pictures can be as literal or associative as we let them be.

By any measure, the book is an exquisite production. The dust jacket is marbled, appearing both liquid and dreamy, printed on a fine matte paper that is pleasing to touch. The pictures are large format and rendered on a coated paper with rich and full colors. Printed one-picture-per-page-spread, with plenty of surrounding white space, River’s Dream invites a patient engagement, asking the reader to pause with each picture and digest the great clarity and emotional complexity it presents. Hatleberg employs color quite effectively in his compositions, never falling for the trap of making color itself the subject of the picture but rather using it to ground and complete the frames, even creating new ideas by repeating colors in individual frames or across the page spreads.

If you compare River’s Dream with Hatleberg’s first book, Lost Coast, a book documenting the landscape, people, and industry of Eureka, California, more comparisons to Cormac McCarthy arise. With his two books, Hatleberg looks to both the West and the South as McCarthy does, and he embraces similar mythologies, using our expectations of these places to shape our reactions and illuminate their tragedies. Nevertheless, in both Lost Coast and River's Dream he offers striking photographs of American communities living along the edges. Following Szarkowski’s theory that photographs are both windows and mirrors, we can use these to better understand who we are today.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.