I’m pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of instability: Photographs of the Unexpected, a book of photographs created in collaboration with Eric Zeigler.
You can now pre-order instability, and the first 25 orders from the USA will also receive a signed photographic print from the book.
Pre-orders received by September 29 will be shipped to arrive by the winter holidays!
instability
Watch for long enough, and anything that appears to be stable will reveal its true perpetual state of instability. But imaging devices record single glances of the world: Crack! Trees fall, shutters snap, photographs are fixed. We have been conditioned to expect a photograph to capture decisive moments, but how do we know which ones are decisive? Further, when we overlay the fixed objectif-icity of still images on film, paper, and glowing screens onto our expectations of how the world “works,” we are subconsciously disregarding change and misinterpreting the instability of the reality we live in.
We visualize this instability in 145 images that we created from 2020 through 2024 using contemporary versions of 19th-century dry collodion glass plates, 20th-century film, and new digital technologies. We use these different methods to challenge interpretations of the assumed objective reality of a photograph and illuminate contradictions in 21st-century narratives of environmental stability and preservation. Following the suggestion of Walter Benjamin (in his Illuminations), we work to “attain a conception of history [and the present] that is in keeping with the tradition of the oppressed, which teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” With our images, we reclaim the aesthetics behind the myths of the Westward Expansion, the American Frontier, and similar colonialist activities that have occurred throughout the world, and we record modern ecosystems deemed healthy and stable only because we’ve left them alone. For example, the economic progress flowing down rivers and onto the transcontinental railroads ironically created the context for preservation of old-growth forests—tiny islands of nature within a vast ocean of unchecked development. Are these reserves or theme parks? Are they really stable, unchanging, and, as the US National Park Service would have it, “unimpaired?” How are they connected to the human-modified environments around them? The essence of their ongoing and essential decay, normally hidden behind an opaque, yet gossamer fog, is unveiled in instability.
The first incarnation of instability was produced as an oversize (19 x 13-inch) “book dummy” entitled DoubleTake, which was entered into photobook competitions around the world. DoubleTake was chosen for inclusion in the 14th Annual Photobook Exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts, and it is now in their permanent collection. It also accompanied our solo exhibition of selected photographs in July 2024 at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo, Republic of Korea, and has been accessed into their permanent collection, too. A smaller (9 x 6-inch), limited-edition version of DoubleTake accompanied our solo exhibition in August 2024 at Hartwick Pines State Park in Grayling, Michigan.
Finally, DoubleTake – now greatly expanded (from 51 to 145 images) and renamed instability – was chosen by the Danish publisher Snap Collective to be one of the photobooks they are publishing in 2024.
Learn more about, and see selected images from, instability here
Pre-order instability before September 29 to ensure delivery by the winter holidays.
The first 25 orders from the USA will also receive a signed photographic print from the book.
The Unbalanced Ecologist 