Photographers Andrew Newson and Allie Mount (previously featured here and on the Great Leap gallery site) have collaborated on a 12 month long project documenting specific local areas in a reciprocal form, with the aim of producing four diptychs each month depicting Chailey Commons, Sussex (UK) and Oak Bottoms, Oregon (USA) respectively.

Follow the link to see some of the work produced thus far.

Pinched from justinjamesreed’s blog, the above photograph is from Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude. An instant favourite recent purchase of 2012, this book has an elusive and elliptical approach to its own narrative, but it rewards patience and patient fascination, and has a rich, complex feel to it that is stregnthened by repeated viewings. It deals respectfully and thoughtfully with violence, isolation, loneliness, a neglected kind of life for the working poor, and the intersection of myth and history in the contemporary American imagination. Nicholas Muellner’s written piece builds upon the overall feel of the book in inventive, intelligent and intriguing ways.

Go see, go buy.

“The images in Ron Jude’s landscapes are not metaphors, ironic commentaries or ecological critiques. They are not about “landscape” or painting or suburban sprawl. They are not “about”; they are descriptions that pass directly into ontological sensation. Here is how this game works…

The places in these pictures are transitional, and therefore nameless within the standard vocabularies of landscape: between the parking lot and the woods, the train-tracks and the stream, the highway and the field. They exist only as a result of the exigencies and limits of other things and forces. These places are neither physically nor symbolically functional: not “pure” or “ruined” or even “useful”. They are the kinds of places where dead bodies or other illegal garbage might be left, on the theory that, lacking definition, a place is not a destination, and nobody would look where they cannot name. These places are neither discovered nor made; they are simply there.

I am moved, repeatedly, to the negative mode of classification with these images – what they are not – because that is the taxonomy that they demand. The un-noticed or non-canonical landscape has, of course, a canon in American photography – William Eggleston and Stephen Shore jumping most eagerly to mind. These two artists have, in their own modes, made images that redeem the ordinary through a sensuous exultation of representation. The everyday successfully aspires to worthiness. It becomes Landscape.

Jude’s photographs lead us elsewhere. They are unquestionably aesthetic within a photographic vocabulary – the richness and subtlety of tone and light, the twin seductions of fantastic detail and a baroque complexity of elements. How can we not say that these considerations enact that same transformation from namelessness to valued subject? The answer lies in an insistence on non-transcendent presence. Their being is not transformed but thoroughly enumerated in its parts. Jude’s formal structures persistently frustrate the aesthetic closure that transcendence requires. The moment of perception – the light falling on the backs of leaves, the subtle coloration and complex organization of branches – serves only to describe with greater fullness the moment of presence, seen and articulated, not trans-substantiated. We are brought brilliantly into sympathy with this quality of place, and we feel unredeemed but extant: phenomenologically linked to the terrible reduction of these rigorously existential landscapes.”

— from the excellent essay “The Landscape Game” by Nicholas Muellner, on Ron Jude’s photography in Other Nature 1999 - 2007.

The Tree, by Sarah Katherine Moore.

“Vermont Avenue & Wishire Boulevard, 1979” by Anthony Hernandez, from the seminal book of photographs Waiting, Sitting, Fishing and Some Automobiles, published by John Gossage’s Loosestrife Editions.

See a slideshow of some of the spreads in the book here.

The tremendously impressive and ambitious Redwood Saw, by Richard Rothman. If you’ve not seen it, there’s also a lengthy essay on the book up here.

(via Xavier Ribas, antropología del territorio por Miren Pastor on Vimeo)

Photograph by Isabelle Fexa.