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An unassuming sequence of 42 medium-format photographs depicting slivers of the semirural landscape of Central Illinois Tim Carpenter's (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of "camera" he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography's capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child's meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter--marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon--nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers--Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz--these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.

The sequel to Bad Luck, Hot Rocks includes more rueful letters from repentant tourists, this time on stealing lava rocks from Hawai'iFollowing a trail of regret from the Petrified Forest (the subject of his classic Bad Luck, Hot Rocks) to the islands of Maui and Hawai'i, artist and educator Ryan Thompson considers the implications of another trove of handwritten apologies, this time from the archives of the Haleakala and Hawai'i Volcanoes National Parks. Written to accompany chunks of volcanic rock and other objects that tourists have pilfered from the Islands and subsequently returned (because of bad luck or bad conscience), the notes and letters express not only a need for forgiveness but also an awareness of the writers' relationship to the Hawaiian landscape, and perhaps also to earth itself--a taking-and-returning phenomenon that (as noted in his earlier book) is its own form of absolution and self-help. Ah Ah weaves together Thompson's own black-and-white travelog with vibrantly colored "portraits" of the returned specimens and facsimiles of selected letters into an endearing reflection on humanity's troubling (but hopeful) entanglement with geology, colonialism and tourism in the Anthropocene.Ryan Thompson lives and works in Chicago, where he is an artist and associate professor of art and design at Trinity Christian College. His ongoing Department of Natural History projects engage a range of complex and peculiar relationships between humans and the natural world. He is the coauthor of the bestselling photobook Bad Luck, Hot Rocks.

A book-length essay about photography's unique ability to ease the ache of human mortalityDrawing on the writings of Wallace Stevens, Marilynne Robinson and other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) argues passionately--in one main essay and a series of lively digressions--that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one's sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality.Printed in three colors that reflect the various "voices" of the book, the text design follows several channels of thought, inviting various approaches to reading. A unique and instructive contribution to the literature on photography, Carpenter's research offers both a timely polemic and a timeless resource for those who use a camera.

A first collection of Los Angeles artist Jon Huck's hauntingly beautiful watercolor paintings on paper and woodThe bold first collection of watercolors on paper and wood by Los Angeles artist Jon Huck (born 1961), At the Drop of a Hat portrays a wild tableau of misfits and weirdos caught in a panoply of odd scenarios and ambivalent moods. There are masks, costumes, recurring props and motifs, and a pervasive ambiguity between human and beast. A gleefully deranged comedy animates these bright surfaces--a sense of spontaneous mischief and delight in the brush strokes and blurred paints--but also a longing within the characters themselves, hints of dark melancholy and unsettling private narratives.With a self-taught experimental style both unrestrained and delicately precise, Huck is a nuanced observer of gesture, posture and facial expression, of the personae that conceal us and the flaws that make us real.