Julie Blackmon: Midwest Materials

When I photograph, I respond instinctively in the moment to what inspires me. Through the years, I have become more attuned to emotional moments, wrinkles in a face, the nuances of my environment...All of the visual elements resonate more deeply with me emotionally, so do the people I have worked with, including those who are no longer with us.

– Debbie Fleming Caffery, Lenscratch interview

In Light of Everything immortalizes in book form Debbie Fleming Caffery’s first major career retrospective presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Examining the deep emotional relationship between people and place, Caffery is recognized as a leading photographer visualizing the American South. Her shadowy, blurred images thoughtfully feature elements of luster to reveal elements of the shared human experience—childhood, spirituality, labor—and ultimately bring darkness to light. This publication is her most comprehensive to date, showcasing projects produced within and beyond the American South to Mexico, France, and the American West. Caffery’s sixth title, In Light of Everything is the first to feature all series over the course of her career.

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977) began photographing in hotel rooms in 2014, when a trip abroad found him stranded in a foreign city with an abundance of free time and a dearth of creative outlets. He began assembling the furniture in his room into a series of installations, photographing as he went along. Since then, his fascination with the hotel room as both a laboratory for creativity and a zone of transgression has only intensified.

In the intervening years he has developed a stringent approach to making the work: he uses only the furniture found in the rooms he occupies; he works in secret; he works alone. Using this approach, Yudzon stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that transform these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released. After the installations are documented, they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpires during his stay.

Initially conceived as a series of journeys, A Room for the Night focuses exclusively on American hotels. The aim of this book is not to present a comprehensive overview of hotels in America. Rather, the images and text contemplate our uneasy relationship to the hotel as a liminal space operating beyond the codes and conventions that govern the outside world. Combining dark humor, loneliness and creative obsession, this work tells the story of not just the installations, but of the hotels themselves, the people that own and operate them, the communities in which they're based, and the journey through which they are connected.

Learn more about the artist’s accompanying Limited Edition prints HERE.

Photographs by Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb
Essay by Pico Iyer

Softbound with printed slipcase
10 x 11.25 inches
144 pages / 70 color images
ISBN: 9781942185376

Trade $60
Now Rare: $150
Signed copies no longer available.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

“[Blackmon has] taken a subject that is ripe for cliché—mother photographing children— and through the subtle, digital manipulations, the use of color and highly graphic images, she’s given it humor and edge and taken the subject somewhere fresh.” 

— Anne Wilkes Tucker

Photographs by Julie Blackmon
Essay by Regina Hackett
Interview by Alison Nordstrom

Hardcover
11.25 x 11.25 inches
97 pages / 43 images
ISBN: 9781934435045 — $50

Rare: $500.00
SOLD OUT