$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC with jacket
152 pages with 83 four-color photographs by the author
12.0″ x 12.0″ square
ISBN: 978-1–938086–77-9
Published in October 2020
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Read an interview with Tom Young with Maine Museum of Photographic Arts 2021
by Tom Young
Essay by Aprile Gallant
Tom Young’s most ambitious photo book to date renders our time on Earth in new ways.
Wide-ranging and operatic in scale and in scope, Our Time on Earth—Tom Young’s fourth book—is an intuitive gaze at the mystery, promise, and condition of human life on Earth in 2020. In an expansive collection of eighty-three new photographs, artfully sequenced into thematic parts, Young brings to us a visual narrative that simultaneously hints at the apocalyptic unfolding of contemporary life while offering reverential hope for a better world.
Through a collision of images as minute as a molded snow globe, as expansive as a roiling ocean, and as haunting as steam belching from the tower of a nuclear power plant, Young brings the reader on an epic journey. Here one finds the prayerful silence of a goat at peace in a freshly dug grave, the human tableaux of young people amidst the drenching power of water, and the simple magnificence of moving water frozen into icy stillness. Here as well one finds disturbing aspects of the human mosaic to be found in the common places of everyday life, from a school bus abandoned in a vast mined landscape to a collapsing building in the shape of a large cat.
In Tom Young’s universe, juxtaposition tells a story while the precise rendering of a moment in time speaks to the mystery of creation and the devotion of a photographer trying to understand a complicated world. As curator Aprile Gallant observes in her insightful essay: “The images build upon the other, veering from macro to micro, from vegetable, animal, and mineral to welded, constructed, and manufactured . . . The aggregate of viewing is an awareness of the deep interconnectedness of humans and their environment, a drama that plays out in equally beneficial and devastating ways.”
Our Time on Earth plays knowingly off the idea that human endeavors on the planet can be as brief as the beat of a hummingbird’s wing and as long-lasting as mercury and lead embedded in a local river or stream. The question thus arises as to how the traces we leave behind from our time on Earth will reverberate as we move forward to the next generation and the next and the next.
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, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, High Museum of Art, Polaroid International Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 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, Frans Hals Museum, Kunsthalle, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His previous books of photographs are Backscatter: Between Here and There (George F. Thompson, 2016), Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed (George F. Thompson, 2012), and Recycled Realities, with John Willis (Center for American Places, 2006). Tom Young Photography: www.tomyoungphoto.com
About the Contributor
Aprile Gallant is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Smith College Museum of Art, where she is also responsible for the administration of the Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. In this capacity she is the primary curator in charge of SCMA’s 24,000-piece works-on-paper collection. She has also played an integral part in the development of the overall collections and programs, including exhibitions on topics ranging from American prints (Defiant Vision: Prints & Poetry by Munio Makuuchi, 2019) and artist’s books (Too Much Bliss: Twenty Years of Granary Books, 2006) to contemporary photography (Photographing Undomesticated Interiors, 2003). She has been an active member of the Print Council of America since 1999.
Slide Show
Praise
“Human intervention has caused extensive and now dire consequences for our Earth. Even for a photographer, every image is an intervention as a frame is extracted from a larger reality. And Tom Young further intervenes, montaging images of the natural world to create an alternative language so that we can stop and contemplate our role in the timeline of human history and the history of the planet we inhabit. What emerges is disquieting—and a challenge to do better. Just because we homo sapiens have outlasted other hominid species does not mean that we are not an evolutionary dead end. Tom Young’s evocative images remind us that we are at a tipping point. We have to change to survive or Nature will be quite content to go on without us.”
—Stephen Perloff, Editor, The Photo Review
“Our Time on Earth is an astoundingly beautiful book!”
—David Wharton, Director of Documentary Studies, University of Mississippi, and author of Small Town South and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South
“The expressive images in Tom Young’s Our Time on Earth live at a poetic interface between Nature before homo sapiens and changes wrought by the hand of man on the third planet from the sun. The often ambiguous juxtaposition of natural phenomena and post-industrial landscapes in Young’s photos urge the viewer toward greater awareness of our role in reshaping Earth and the future that awaits us if we continue in our present ways of being.”
—Stephen E. Strom, Associate Director for Science, Emeritus, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and author of Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea and Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land
“Artist/photographer Tom Young has a stated interest in what he calls reverb—the traces we leave behind and what they say about us. I could say “the traces humans leave behind,” but Young is more deliberate in his “we,” for there is a sense of belonging and responsibility that goes along with human impact, in which each person is individually implicated. His newest project grew organically: He sought out places where the visual residue of human agency were visible to him both in places where we might think they exist (such as degraded industrial sites he is so fond of photographing) and places where it might not occur to us to look. Many of the images evoke these layers of awareness through juxtapositions of visual barriers—mirrors, plastic, water, mist. Each is a framed window that both blocks and invites peering… The aggregate of viewing is an awareness of the deep interconnectedness of humans and their environment, a drama that plays out in equally beneficial and devastating ways.”
—Aprile Gallant, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Smith College Museum of Art (read interview here)
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.