Bøger udgivet af ICE PLANT

An unassuming sequence of 42 medium-format photographs depicting slivers of the semirural landscape of Central Illinois Tim Carpenter's (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of "camera" he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography's capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child's meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter--marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon--nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers--Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz--these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.

The sequel to Bad Luck, Hot Rocks includes more rueful letters from repentant tourists, this time on stealing lava rocks from Hawai'iFollowing a trail of regret from the Petrified Forest (the subject of his classic Bad Luck, Hot Rocks) to the islands of Maui and Hawai'i, artist and educator Ryan Thompson considers the implications of another trove of handwritten apologies, this time from the archives of the Haleakala and Hawai'i Volcanoes National Parks. Written to accompany chunks of volcanic rock and other objects that tourists have pilfered from the Islands and subsequently returned (because of bad luck or bad conscience), the notes and letters express not only a need for forgiveness but also an awareness of the writers' relationship to the Hawaiian landscape, and perhaps also to earth itself--a taking-and-returning phenomenon that (as noted in his earlier book) is its own form of absolution and self-help. Ah Ah weaves together Thompson's own black-and-white travelog with vibrantly colored "portraits" of the returned specimens and facsimiles of selected letters into an endearing reflection on humanity's troubling (but hopeful) entanglement with geology, colonialism and tourism in the Anthropocene.Ryan Thompson lives and works in Chicago, where he is an artist and associate professor of art and design at Trinity Christian College. His ongoing Department of Natural History projects engage a range of complex and peculiar relationships between humans and the natural world. He is the coauthor of the bestselling photobook Bad Luck, Hot Rocks.

A photographic reverie on the anxieties of the human condition, from the author of Dive Dark Dream SlowA wild, insomniac cousin to her somnambulist classic Dive Dark Dream Slow, Pittsburgh-based Melissa Catanese's (born 1979) The Lottery reads like a work of speculative fiction: a glimpse into an anxious human civilization suspended between uncertain futures and the aftermath of its distant and recent past. Seamlessly combining her own recent photographs with anonymous vernacular photos, press images and NASA archival imagery, Catanese's intuitive editing reanimates the pictures' dormant surfaces, evoking the mob mentality and tribalism of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," as well as the cosmic indeterminacy at the heart of our unfolding present. Throughout the sequence, we see catastrophic forces punctuated by scenes of serenity, tenderness and fragility. Crowds gather to gawk, passively entertained by unseen horrors. Lone figures claw, swim and bend, haunted and creaturely, isolated and immersed in primordial landscapes. Brief fragments of text from Virginia Woolf hint at a glimmer of hope for regeneration.

A book-length essay about photography's unique ability to ease the ache of human mortalityDrawing on the writings of Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson and other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) argues passionately--in one main essay and a series of lively digressions--that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one's sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality.Printed in three colors that reflect the various "voices" of the book, the text design follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. A unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, Carpenter's research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.

A first collection of Los Angeles artist Jon Huck's hauntingly beautiful watercolor paintings on paper and woodThe bold first collection of watercolors on paper and wood by Los Angeles artist Jon Huck (born 1961), At the Drop of a Hat portrays a wild tableau of misfits and weirdos caught in a panoply of odd scenarios and ambivalent moods. There are masks, costumes, recurring props and motifs, and a pervasive ambiguity between human and beast. A gleefully deranged comedy animates these bright surfaces--a sense of spontaneous mischief and delight in the brush strokes and blurred paints--but also a longing within the characters themselves, hints of dark melancholy and unsettling private narratives.With a self-taught experimental style both unrestrained and delicately precise, Huck is a nuanced observer of gesture, posture and facial expression, of the personae that conceal us and the flaws that make us real.

The Petrified Forest National Park in Northeast Arizona protects one of the largest deposits of petrified wood in the world. Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a "conscience letter." These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologize or ask forgiveness.

In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude's latest series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry. In this handsome volume, two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) combine to create a subtle and uncanny instance of what Jude has called the "slippery threshold of narrative" in still images. Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude's accounts of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be mistaken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to merge, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and the things hovering just outside our physical perception.