$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with jacket
128 pages with 60 four-color photographs by the author
9.0″ x 12.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978-1–938086–10–6
Published in Fall 2012
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Exhibitions and Book Events:
Exhibition: through the month of October 2013
Book Talk: October 23 at 4:30pm in the Bill Brand screening room
a reception and book signing will follow
Hampshire College Amherst, MA
The Jerome Liebling Center Gallery
February 4―May 31, 2012
Manchester, New Hampshire
Currier Museum of Art
Exhibition: A New Vision: Modernist Photography
May 16―May 20, 2012
Brooklyn, New York
111 Front Street Gallery 210
Exhibition: New York Photo Festival
May 18, 2013
Philadelphia Arts Center Book Fair
by Tom Young
Nominated for a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award.
Timeline is among the most poetic photographic projects to emerge in the art world in years. For many of us, the photo album is a way to preserve memories of personal and family events that are worth noting, worth sharing, worth saving: pregnancies and birthdays, day trips and child’s play, time with our pets, friendships and reunions, portraits of our house and garden, and even scenes of spirituality and despair caused by news of cancer. Each album thus becomes an archive of who we are as a person, as a family.
Tom Young has taken this old idea and created a new genre: visual fiction. Using iconographic, layered images to tell his story without the usual tools of vivid contrast, bold colors, or sharp, finite detail, Young’s visual assemblages are personal and evocative, sharing a complex internal landscape of love and loss, seen as through a shadowy veil. Here, then, is a marriage of landscape and portraiture that suggests not only a visual narrative of the photographer’s life, but also, through the power of memory and shared experience, the reader’s life.
When Young was only ten years old, he had a medical procedure that left his eyes fully bandaged for weeks. Without sight, all of his other senses changed. Despite the darkness, he would imagine the world around him and the power of light as it relates to memory. In Timeline, one senses that the artist is seeing his entire world unfold before him like an end-of-life dream recollected in a few split seconds. One image leads to another, building in nuance and subtlety until we come to understand, as if by way of a sixth sense, how the little details of life create a larger retrospective. “If pictures could talk, what a tale they might tell.” That thought lurks behind every image of Young’s masterful visual story of a life: his? yours?
About
About the Author
Tom Young was born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and his B.A. in photography from Goddard College in Vermont in 1973. From 1979 to 2011 he was a professor of art at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Although now retired, he continues to teach as a visiting artist and professor of photography and art at Amherst College and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He has received an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, five Artist Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and, in 2009, the Governor’s Citation for contributions to the arts of Massachusetts. His photographs are included in more than thirty permanent collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Center for Creative Photography, Corcoran Gallery of Art, George Eastham House International Museum of Photography, High Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Polaroid International Collection in Offenbach, Germany, and Yale University Art Gallery. Young’s photographs have also appeared in more than eighty exhibitions worldwide, including those at the International Center of Photography in New York City, Frans Hals Museum in Harlem, The Netherlands, Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Tokyo Museum of Photography. His first book of photographs, Recycled Realities, with John Willis, was published by the Center for American Places, in association with Columbia College Chicago, in 2006. His photographs have also appeared in American Perspectives (Tokyo Museum of Photography, 2000), Goodbye to Apple Pie (DeCordova Museum, 1992), and Artworks: Tom Young (Williams College Museum of Art, 1990).
Slide Show
My Place
I live in the foothills in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Our old farmhouse is located in the rural town of Buckland, between two moving bodies of water, Clesson Brook and Shepard Brook. The land that surrounds the house is a combination of open hayfields, pasture for livestock, and forest. My studio, in the adjacent town of Shelburne Falls, sits right on the Deerfield River.
The sights and sounds of moving water are a constant in my life―always a source of both meditation and inspiration. I love the water’s interaction with the calendar year, the weather and seasons here in the heart of New England. It is always changing in form, wonderfully peaceful, and, at other times, violent. I hear it and see it almost every day. It asks me to listen and to look with attention.
Likewise, the animals I live with—old angora goats—speak to me in a way that is laced with an ancient wisdom and knowingness. We call them our Talmud scholars, for their long, ring-letted fiber on the sides of their deep, watchful eyes. Gentle, quiet, and meditative in aspect, they bring me a kind of solace at the end of a busy day. The ritual of haying, feeding, and watering mark the beginning and end of each day, and the goats are there at the gate reliably, expectant, and silent.
Copyright © 2013 Tom Young. All rights reserved.