Little (The Ice Plant, 2024)

Tim Carpenter’s Little completes a trilogy of photobooks rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of “camera” he elaborated in the book-length essay To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die (2022). Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017), 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.

The Crisis Tapes (TIS, 2024)

Charlie Simokaitis’s The Crisis Tapes is an account of when his daughter gradually lost her ability to see over the course of two years and experienced a powerful psychological response to her imminent, presumably diminished, reality. Depression and circular episodes of deep mental un-wellness have pervaded her subsequent life, and that of his family, like a reoccurring grieving process. As parents seeking a pathway forward, they found themselves navigating a bureaucratic network of mazes, with duplicitous functionaries acting as their guides in a hall of mirrors. Over time, they found they had assumed the role of subjective interpreters of her once-visible world, the descriptions of their surroundings, objects and phenomena becoming more exacting and streamlined. While their daughter, retreating from life, sought refuge in a forest of her own making, Charlie Simokaitis drew from the emotionally heightened disorientation, rage and confusion of their everyday life - a life, for his daughter, that was growing narrower by degrees, in which the act of seeing itself was being thoroughly considered.