$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Limited edition clothbound with jacket
112 pages with 78 four-color photographs by the author
9.0″ x 12.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978-1–938086–38–0
Published in November 2016
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
by Tom Young
with an essay by John Rohrbach
Tom Young’s amazing sequel to Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed is something to behold, as the artist explores and imagines the spaces that have shaped our evolutionary past and direct us to an uncertain future.
Backscatter is the reflection of particles, waves, or signals back to the direction from which they came: in underwater photography, back to the lens. The reflection, however, is diffuse, as opposed to clear like a mirror, thus softening images and even making them obscure.
For this book, Tom Young has embraced backscatter as both subject and metaphor to render spaces below and above the water’s surface—between here and there—in highly original ways. Our senses are awakened as Young creates images that evoke an evolutionary path from sea to land, that speak of a global environment increasingly threatened by human action, and that enlighten our consciousness with an abiding spirit larger than ourselves.
In Young’s previous book, the masterful Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed, the artist was drawn to the way multiple images can be assembled into a single photographic plate that both alters the intent and enhances the meaning of the individual images. Young has followed that same path in Backscatter, as the edge of one image is shared with the edge of another that simultaneously can fuse them into one voice or let them remain as separate voices, suggesting a deep conversation either way. As the sequence evolves, so, too, does the visual narrative whose assembly of diverse images presents unexpected relationships and an unforgettable storyline.
Metaphorically, Backscatter is about looking head on into a void where what lies above and below the water’s surface can seem harmonious yet helter-skelter. As John Rohrbach observes in his afterword, this is a “ferocious book” that brings us to a myriad places, each one real and imagined, conveying an overall sense of the human journey through life.
About
About the Author
Tom Young is Professor of Art Emeritus at Greenfield Community College whose 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 Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, High Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Houston, Polaroid International Collection, Offenbach, Germany, Houston Museum of Fine Art, 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, New York City; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands; Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His first two books of photographs are Recycled Realities, with John Willis (2006), and Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed (2012). Tom Young Photography: www.tomyoungphoto.com
About the Essayist
John Rohrbach is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in American civilization from the University of Delaware, where his dissertation topic was the work of Paul Strand. His publications include “Time in New England: Creating a Usable Past,” in Paul Strand: Essays on His Life and Work (1991); Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness (2001); Regarding the Land: Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Legacy of Eliot Porter (2006); and Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (2007).
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.