Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597110914 ISBN 13: 9781597110914

Publisher: Aperture, 2009

Synopsis

A culmination of four years of photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, "Sawdust Mountain" focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future--no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests. Johnson, a Seattle native, describes his photographs as, "a melancholy love letter of sorts, my own personal ramblings..." Through this poetic approach, "Sawdust Mountain" records a region affected by historic economic complexities and, by extension, one aspect of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.
Eirik Johnson, born in Seattle in 1974, is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, George Eastman House and Aperture Gallery. His first book, "Borderlands," was awarded the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2005.

About this title

About the Author:

Erik Johnson's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, George Eastman House, and Aperture Gallery. His first book, Borderlands, was awarded the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2005.

Review:

"With photography taken in the American Northwest (Oregon, Washington and Northern California), Sawdust Mountain portrays the issues facing that region, for example growing environmental concerns about logging. Of course, it is not a simple story. Despite the fact that we love simple narratives - with us facing 'evildoers' - the reality, of course, is quite different. That reality asks for a photographer to come and to experience, to see the different facets, to take photographs without preconditioned responses. This is what Johnson did, and the result clearly is more than 'just' a fine-art photography book." -- Jörg Colberg --Conscientious blog

"A permanent mist hangs over the inhabitants of a region Mr. Johnson calls Sawdust Mountain, and it isn't just the rainy climate. In his moving group portrait of a community of loggers and fisherman in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Johnson, a native son, documents the precariousness of life in this corner of America. At the same time, his photographs capture the defiance of those who have made certain choices--rural solitude instead of an urban economy--and are content (or not) with that bargain." -- Richard B. Woodward --Wall Street Journal

"Eirik Johnson's quietly theatrical photographs carry the sense of a way of life and work that is on the cusp of slipping away... Although the images are unsentimental, many exert a strangely emotive tug - part nostalgia for an optimistic past, part sadness that a natural environment, indelibly marked and altered by mankind, is dissolving before our eyes." -- Claire Holland --Financial Times Weekend Magazine

"A bonafide work of true documentary photography at its finest, Sawdust Mountain represents four years of photography in the Pacific Northwest by a young photographer looking at the relationships among the fishing and timber industries, the natural resources they exploit, and the resulting ambivalent relationships. Throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, Eirik Johnson created his own kind of melancholy love letter to the natural environmnents he loves, and to their uncertain future." -- Jay Gardner --Picture Magazine

"His images are depressing but not hopeless. The landscape may not be poised for recovery, but it's ready for the next uncertain thing--new uses, though surely with fewer users. Johnson portrays those who remain with stoic, mossy fortitude." -- Brian Miller --Seattle Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1597110914
• ISBN 13: 9781597110914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 143