NATURAL LIGHT
published by Kehrer Verlag - June Europe, November US release
Natural Light (2022)
Texts by Rita Bullwinkel, and Claire Daigle
Interview by Alec Soth with J. John Priola
Designed by Bob Aufuldish, Aufuldish & Warinner
Hardcover ca. 22 x 27 cm , 144 pages
92color and b/w plates
$52.00 includes tax, and domestic shipping
From the essay by Rita Bullwinkel
Photographs are themselves a form of human artifice. They rot when soaked in water. Each section of Natural Light begins with an archival nature photograph taken by J. John Priola’s horticulturalist mother, and thus Natural Light contains photographs by two generations of people who have harnessed their awe of nature. What makes J. John Priola’s photographs captivating is their truthfulness about our messy, flawed relationship with nature.
From the interview by Alec Soth with J.John Priola:
AS: There is a curiosity, but also a distance. And built into that curiosity is a distance. It’s actually something I wondered about you. I wonder if you had something similar going on because there is all this emotional content in your work, but it’s at a little bit of a distance.
JJP: Yeah, I see that so clearly. In high school, my houseplants were my best friends. I drove my parents crazy with my hundreds of houseplants.
From the essay by Claire Daigle:
Trees carry years in their rings. They persist, possessed of a patient sort of sentience. Tender shoots stage small rebellions and reach a bit further toward light. Roots crack concrete. Weeds are bound to crop up. Where nature escapes the windowsill, the photographer steps back to witness a riotous shock of fresh, pink lilies exploding against snow-flattened, straw-brittle grass.
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ONCE REMOVED:
Portraits by J. John Priola (1998)
Hardbound, 74 plates
Introduction by Andy Grundberg
Essay by Rebecca Solnit
$52.00 includes tax, and domestic shipping
"There are objects that seem to go unchanging through the centuries and there are the teacups we dropped when the telephone rang late at night and the thousands of objects borne away from us on a tide of entropy, disintegration and distraction, never to return. I know where to find a Praxiteles statue, but where are my baby teeth?"
- Rebecca Solnit
A contributing editor to Art Issues and Creative Camera, Solnit is the author of numerous books, and essays in many museum catalogues, including, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach and the Whitney Museum's Beat Culture and the New America.
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"For what is traced in these photographs is not merely the object, or the sign of its residual physical presence avant the photograph, but the echo of its historical resonances and place in time."
- Andy Grundberg
Grundberg is a writer and curator, former director of the Friends of Photography and the founder of See: A Journal of Visual Culture. A former photography critic for The New York Times, Grundberg's essays have appeared in numerous books, journals and magazines.
