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Emerald Drifters
Photographs by Cig Harvey
Monacelli Press, New York, NY, 2025. 224 pp., 100 illustrations.

In the last few hundred years, science has worked hard to convince us that everything is knowable. We have grown accustomed to understanding the world through the lens of this distorted truth. Cig Harvey, in her fifth monograph, Emerald Drifters, invites us to return to the wonder of being.

Across its 224 pages, Emerald Drifters uses color as a container for life—a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks—where we encounter the divine in shades and tones of yellow, red, and blue. Its 101 photographs include the open-mouthed face of a porcelain cupid, the “woozy caverns and erect peaks” of a chocolate cake, and an abundant smoky tableau inspired by eighteenth century Flemish still lifes. These images stand side by side with watercolor diagrams, ‘how-to’ instructionals, and vignettes of creative non-fiction from The Sky Is Blue Only for You to How to Welcome the Unwanted.

In The Sublime and the Beautiful, Harvey writes, “In 1797, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant made two columns in his notepad, dividing aesthetics into the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime was to be revered as majestic, important, multiple, and monumental. The beautiful became the decorative, insignificant, singular, and superficial.” The Scientific Revolution, Kant, Newton, and many others have guided us towards a rejection of beauty. In the contemporary art world, few dare to defend the objective role beauty plays in the human experience and our connection to something greater than self. In Emerald Drifters, Harvey makes a case for its intrinsic value, arguing that beauty is an ontological primitive, a fundamental, irreducible entity—a foundational building block of reality.

Beware. Alongside beauty exists both the awe and the agony of life. A monograph allows photographs to be contextualised beyond the single frame, and when sequenced together, the images speak to one another. In his memoir, Sculpting In Time, filmmaker Andrei Tarvoksky reflects, “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. The best sides of our souls are made known. The unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.”

In Emerald Drifters, there are three sequences that explicitly establish this link for me, as described by Tarkovsky: 

A Red That Bites, a masterclass in associative thinking: red berries, red room, white flowers, open drawer, open mouth white teeth, white napkin dabbed red, dark sky, white window square.

Emerald Drifters, the namesake vignette: a garden at night and a figure (perhaps that of Rebecca Middleton, whose story is shared) both stand amongst and are another iris. We turn the page, the iris becomes small blue flowers, and again, these flowers become a path of light.

From the Emerald Drifters vignette Emerald Drifters

A Sea in Ease, it is here that I discover what the ancient pagans described as a thin place––the shortest distance between Heaven and Earth where we encounter the divine. Harvey writes about the passing of her dog Scarlett. “People send me pictures and videos of [her]. The messages say she will always be with me in spirit, but I don’t want her fucking spirit. I want her warm body pressed against me in my sleep, the smell between her paws. The body is not nothing. The body is everything.”

From the Emerald Drifter vignette A Sea in Ease

Each time I revisit these pages, I am struck. Scarlett’s golden body draped in gold fabric, bright amongst the dark foliage of the garden. I think of Doug (Harvey’s husband) running to retrieve this sheet from their bed––an echo of an earlier vignette, Last Night, I Slept in the Goldenrod. Scarlett rests in a circle of nasturtiums, the colors of life—red, orange, yellow—hold her like a pagan burial. We turn the pages: a halo of yellow mustard weed rising from the darkness, stardust falling in the night sky, a field of birds taking flight. In this work, I am the beholder, bearing witness to her soul as it is carried away. “When dying, beauty is the only language worth speaking.”

From the Emerald Drifter vignette Last Night, I Slept in the Goldenrod

It is in times of crisis where we need most to reclaim our sense of awe. Cig Harvey’s Emerald Drifters reminds us of our humanity. Its pages guide us towards the unknowable truths of goodness, beauty, and the divine. This book is an urgent call to live. Its pages burst at the seams. They “hiss, spit, and flash” rich hues of pleasure, sex, and death. The message is clear: between our first breath in and our last breath out is the everyday of living. Don’t miss out. “Be here now.”

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Madeleine Morlet is an award-winning photographer and writer based in London. She teaches photography at Maine Media Workshops, Penumbra Foundation, and the SE Center for Photography, specializing in the photobook and the narrative potential of photography. Her work as a photo book editor includes Emerald Drifters by Cig Harvey.

Sealskin by Jeff Dworsky

Sealskin
Photographs by Jeff Dworsky
Charcoal Press, Ohio, USA, 2024. 110 pp., 10x13".

In unsettled times like the present, we tend to see the past through rose colored glasses. Jeff Dworsky’s new monograph is a case in point. Sealskin is an idyllic view of his formative years. It’s kicked off with two serene images, a photo of a pink sea horizon looking east at dawn—rose colored, literally— followed by a candlelit portrait of Dworsky’s wife. Both photos are shot on Kodachrome 64 film, and the warm glow of slide transparency sends the reader wistfully back in time. That would be Maine circa 1980 in this case. But these pictures could be mistaken for the 1880s or earlier.

The time warp continues after the title page, with a passage from an old mariner’s fable about women morphing into seals. Its mythological hints are foreboding, its subtext unspoken: enjoy Eden while it lasts. As we plunge deeper into bygone Maine, our antediluvian antennas are tuned. Dworsky meets the moment with one rustic scene after another. Photos of a quaint harbor, fishing equipment, and weathered shingles epitomize daily village chores. These are the old ways, as practiced on the rugged Maine coast near Dworsky’s home. People are present on occasion, but they’re minor figures dwarfed by the landscape. Nature bats last here, at least until a reclining nude resets the mood. It’s Dworsky’s wife again, who appears in Sealskin more often naked than clothed. Defiantly unsealed, you might say.

Some supplemental backstory is helpful here, since none is included in the book. Young Jeff Dworsky originally settled in Maine as a teenager in 1971, a high school dropout from urban Massachusetts. He met his wife soon after, and they made their home on York Island. Dworsky worked as a fisherman in nearby Stonington, and together they raised a family in a Maine off-grid paradise. As described in the lyrical cadence of Charcoal Press, “he dug a well. Built a boat. Planted a garden. Set foundation stones. Built a house. Built traps. Raised sheep. He fathered three children.” Oh yes, there was one more activity. He routinely photographed his young family.

All was good until the late 1980s, when the Penobscot Bay region began to become gentrified by a moneyed class of new settlers. “I saw the Stonington I loved disappearing,” Dworsky remembers. His rose colored glasses were acting up. What was a simple young fisherman to do? He began to photograph his immediate world, hoping to memorialize it before it became too altered. He covered all the local towns, and within a few years he was shooting magazine assignments. Eventually, he ceased photographing Stonington in 1993, and retired from fishing in 2015. At some point, he separated from his wife and she left the island, her Selkie destiny fulfilled.

Throw this archive in a photobook stew, hit blend, and you get Sealskin. From an editing standpoint, it’s a mermaid of sorts, blending two congruent bodies of work: family pictures and social documentary. With no captions or dates to distinguish the strands, they weave together rather seamlessly. Domestic bliss blurs with harbor life, as pregnancy, birth, and toddlerhood alternate with lobster pots, oceanscapes, and crusty characters. The mix would be more jarring if the pictures did not feel apiece. But they do. For one thing, everything is viewed through the rearview mirror, and thus kept at arm’s length. It also helps that the book is shot with Kodachrome palette. The film’s amber glow is a unifying feature, soaking Sealskin in a calming radiance. Rub your fingers along the faux-leather cover and you’ll be lulled into reverie. All is well in the world. Or at least it was forty years ago.

If you’ve kept up with Charcoal Press, Sealskin’s central themes will be familiar. Jesse Lenz has played with old world motifs before. In fact, those rose-colored glasses are something of a Charcoal trademark, rooted directly in Lenz’s own life. His books The Seraphim and The Locusts capture various adventures on his family farm in rural Ohio, in circumstances much like old coastal Maine. Kids test themselves against the elements, wildlife is a constant presence, and earnest yeomen make their livelihood from the land, all set in a rural paradise. Charcoal’s Echo Mask, Gandras, and Dormant Season riff on similar themes, and Sealskin slots well into the catalog. “Jeff Dworsky embodies my ideal of an artist,” writes Lenz, “someone obsessed with living their life and making pictures as the byproduct.”

No one would doubt Dworsky’s work ethic. But it’s an open question how tightly the byproduct was crammed to fit the brief. “This one’s really Jesse’s book,” says Dworsky. “He can do whatever he wants, and that’s fine. But I’m going to do my own [expletive] books.” Hmm. Perhaps those are just the grumblings of a cantankerous fisherman? Dworsky doesn’t say what future books he has in mind, or how they might be edited differently, or who the publisher might be. As for the one at hand, it’s a pleasant time warp containing several stunning images. Compiled into a monograph with nostalgic and fabulist spin, Sealskin’s rose colored view might be just the tonic for our unsettled era.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Gong Co. by Christian Patterson.

Gong Co.
Photographs by Christian Patterson
TBW Books & Éditions Images Vevey, 2024. 224 pp., 164 color plates, 9x11".

Photography has a Vishnu complex. While regular folks are blithely content to let people and moments fade into the past, photographers want to preserve them. That urge kicks into high gear when destruction looms. Raise your hand if you’ve ever photographed an old building scheduled for demolition, a patch of nature before development into a subdivision, a rusting antique car, or birthday candles about to be blown out. To photograph is to freeze time, locking the present into the historical record. We capture reality like a bug trapped in amber. Vishnu (The “Preserver” in Hinduism) would approve.

For photographer Christian Patterson, the amber bug bit hard on a 2003 road trip through the Mississippi Delta. During a short stop in the small town of Merigold, an old brick building stirred his curiosity. It housed a family-owned store with the name painted on the side in all-caps: THE GONG CO. Patterson took some photographs and made a mental note of the location. Over the next several years he returned multiple times to poke around and take more pictures. Each visit, he found the store in worse shape than before. Its shelves stored a dusty museum of old merchandise. Did it actually sell anything? Who knew. Eventually, on a stop in 2013, he found the business closed for good. By that point Patterson had arranged private access through the owner. He continued to photograph in and around The Gong Co. until 2019 when the interior was finally gutted.

After a few years of editing, sequencing, and production tweaks, Patterson has released his findings as a photo monograph. Gong Co.’s co-publishers TBW and Éditions Images Vevey describe it as “a monumental memento mori to the decline and decay of a family-owned grocery store.” That’s a fair portrayal. But there’s a fine line between memento mori and ruin porn, as Patterson would be the first to admit. His shopworn photographs hang somewhere in the balance between the two poles, a precarious stance which lends them visual punch.

Before seeing any photos, Gong Co. puts the reader in a bygone mood with clever design features. For starters, the dust jacket has the texture and color of a brown paper sack. The simulacrum effect is enhanced with faux grocery stickers, masking tape, and a grimy hand print. Pulling back the jacket’s exterior folds — adorned with phrases like “Perishable”, “1978”, and “Going Out Of Business” — we uncover photos of stock items from yesteryear’s retail world, amid warnings about procrastination. Images of an air freshener, old-school pull tab, and fly swatter cast a swampy Delta spell. The book’s outer cover plays along. It’s a clothbound green facsimile, seemingly sun faded, thread worn and dog-eared. The endpapers recycle a floral pattern which recalls fifties wallpaper. By all initial appearances Gong Co. could pass for an ancient tome on a neglected bookshelf somewhere, perhaps in a small-town Mississippi shop?

Once past the end pages, the photos begin in earnest, and they continue without letup until the coda. Their sequence follows Patterson’s twenty year path of discovery in bite-sized frames, gradually penetrating from the store’s exterior into its private innards. A rear index charts the trajectory with helpful captions (a good page to study before diving into the photos). Image by image we trace Patterson’s investigations from Highway 61 to Merigold’s town streets, then further into the store’s main space, back rooms, office, and the owner’s home before, inexorably, Gong Co. is finally Going, Going, Gone.

Patterson’s visual style is neutral throughout. It’s a lazy day in the Delta. He’s in no hurry. He can’t quite decide if he should share his secret discovery in broad chunks, or compose it into abstract compositions. Most photos fall into one camp or the other, some into both. For general context, a handful of sweeping interior views of The Gong Co.’s inventory are very helpful. They’re photographed in turn facing N, S, E, and W. The place is a wreck. Peeling paint, displaced products, and debris-strewn aisles signal years of inattention.

Patterson spices these broad views with dozens of closely cropped subjects. Some photos isolate consumer goods and signs, recalling the odd artifactual interjections of Redheaded Peckerwood. Others take a more symbolic approach, blending shadow, shape, and color into visual chiaroscuros. We sense the eerie presence of humans throughout, but it’s subtle. Surely someone must have built and cared for this place at one point. But no actual people appear in the book apart from a few modeled hands. Despite the bright tonality of the book’s coated images, their take-home message is clear. The Gong Co. is a forlorn and forgotten backwater indeed.

If this were just another photobook of decrepit shop scenes — old barn photos, anyone? — I might be tempted to dismiss it as ruin porn and move on. What makes Gong Co. noteworthy is its novel design. In fact, few photobooks can match Gong Co.’s memento mori artifice. I’ve already described the dated cover features, but the main body of the book takes nostalgic homage to another level entirely. The interior pages are speckled with pre-imposed stains, smudge marks, and penciled notes. Some of them whisper “Mystery…” or “To open a store is easy…” The blemishes are faint at first, almost invisible. But they become more pronounced as the book progresses. Fake grease stains seep through multiple sections, a perfect semblance of maltreatment. Spill a few drops of beer on this book? No problem. They’ll blend right in. Feel free to handle with oiled palms too. When Gong Co. is viewed sideways, the spatterings present themselves in force. The page edges are mildewed with browning age marks, as if it was left in a damp place and forgotten a while. For a book about a fading institution, there is no better way to drive the point home.

This isn’t the first time that Patterson has pushed the photobook envelope, nor will it likely be the last. Redheaded Peckerwood broke open the multifarious dam on a generation of photo monographs, while Bottom of the Lake modeled itself after an old phone book. Both were innovative, but Gong Co. might be his most convincing trick yet. I’ve paged through it several times, and I can’t find a weakness in its senescent illusion. It looks, feels, and acts like an aging book. If only it had a mildewed smell, the ruse would be complete. Such a trait might be beyond publishing capability, at least for now. But who knows what the future holds. As Gong Co. proves, the passing of time can unlock many mysteries.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle.

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle
Photographs by Weegee

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2025. 208 pp., 130 black-and-white illustrations, 8¼x10½x1".

"I was stuck, you see, because I didn’t want to do sort of a normal English broken German accent thing, so on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Weegee. You must have heard of him. And he had a little voice…And I got an idea…I put a German accent on top of that, and I suddenly got…him into Dr. Strangelove. So really, it’s Weegee."

— Peter Sellers

Currently on view at the ICP in New York is Weegee: Society of the Spectacle (Jan. 23-May 05, 2025). Incredibly, this is the 6th exhibition dedicated to gruff tabloid photographer; this is in part due to a recent donation to the museum of Weegee’s work by his partner Wilma Wilcox. I haven’t seen the show, but the catalog, published by Thames & Hudson, offers an interesting survey of the curiously unique vision of Weegee.

Born in 1899 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg (today part of Ukraine), Usher Fellig emigrated to the United States in 1913. Upon entry, his name was changed to Arthur Fellig. After teaching himself the basics of photography on his own, Fellig started his professional career as a photographer in 1918, working as both a darkroom technician and a reporter. The work he became most known for began around 1935, when he was a full-time freelance photojournalist. It was around this time he changed his name to Weegee, a homonym for Ouija, because as a reporter he claimed to be clairvoyant, always knowing just where to be as the action started. Working primarily for a leftist-leaning tabloid called PM Weekly, the photographer created an entirely unique archive of crime and other activities in New York City from Prohibition and through World War II.

His news photography might best be described as proto-noir, reportage from the streets of America’s biggest city that looked like stills from the greatest film noir (is it just me, or did Weegee look a little like Edward G. Robinson?), made over a decade before Hollywood co-opted the style. Pioneering the use of flash, the photographer created a unique view of the streets with harsh lighting and deep blacks, making life in New York appear like an existential abyss. Never defining himself as political, Weegee nevertheless created a powerful vision about class in America by frequently giving voice to working-class life in the city. The PM Weekly did define itself as a progressive magazine, a label the photographer denied, but then again, he was also connected to Sid Grossman and the Photo League (where he had his first exhibition). All this work coalesced into his first monograph published in 1945, Naked City, a relentless and raw look at New York composed with over 230 pictures.

Not long after Naked City, Weegee moved to Los Angeles and started what is now referred to as his second period as a photographer. It’s easy to imagine that the work he did in New York took a huge toll — witnessing so much pain and tragedy can never be easy, combined with the demands of running all his own production and business must have been exhausting. In California, he took his pictures in an entirely different direction and focused more on using the darkroom to define his pictures. He photographed many famous people of the day — Ronald Reagan, Mao Tse Tung, and Jackie Kennedy among them — and printed them by projecting the negatives through warped or frosted pieces of glass, prisms, and even condensers from his enlargers, making them all appear as slightly surreal caricatures (apparently Szarkowski hated this work and saw it as a joke, a complete waste of the photographer’s talent).

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is an accessible book that offers a clear, engaging introduction to Weegee’s work, not prioritizing the New York years over California. The pictures are divided into neat, thematic chapters, pointing to major trends and periods in the photographer’s career, each introduced by a quote by Weegee accompanied with a short passage explaining the selection. The contributors include Clement Cheroux, Cynthia Young, Isabelle Bonnet, and David Campany. Cheroux introduces the book and exhibition by presenting the idea that Weegee’s work anticipated Guy Debord and the Situationists International, the French artists that emerged in the 1960s. Like the SI, Weegee challenged our understanding of what cities represent, and, like Debord, understood the importance of the media in defining the urban condition (it’s likely Weegee and Debord never heard of one another). Bonet, a specialist in crime photography, offers insight into the emergence of crime scene photography, both regarding the tabloids and the development of forensic investigation techniques. Campany acknowledges the last major body of work Weegee developed while working on the set of Dr. Strangelove. Director Stanley Kubrick met Weegee early in his career; before he went to Hollywood, he worked as a news photographer in New York City. Kubrick loved Weegee’s work, even noted it as an essential influence, and felt it would be interesting to have him on set. He gave Weegee a unique role, he had already hired two other photographers to provide the studio production stills so the master was allowed to do as he pleased. Kubrick thought the harsh style Weegee developed would be refreshing compared to the more slick and polished pictures the studio wanted. And apparently the photographer really hit it off with Peter Sellers, even influencing the actor’s interpretation of the film’s main character, the Nazi scientist advising the Pentagon on nuclear strategy.

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle provides a great introduction to the legendary photographer’s work. If one is really into collecting photobooks, there are certainly better examples of Weegee’s to be had (primarily Naked City, there are multiple printings of this book), but Society of the Spectacle offers a comprehensive, approachable overview of the photographer’s work, and thus it seems it was really intended as a souvenir for the exhibition rather than as a unique expression of the photographer’s work.

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xxx

Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours

By Carolyn Drake & Andres Gonzalez.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours
Photographs by Carolyn Drake & Andres Gonzalez
MACK, London, 2024. 144 pp., 9x11½".

[Spoiler alert: This review makes the claim that this is a fun book.]

“Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez made photographs side by side along the US-Mexico border between 2018 and 2023.”

Unless you do a little Googling (no fair!) that’s all you get by way of backstory for this book. No captions, no essay, no bios, or curricula vitae. You have the rare opportunity to take a photobook on its merits as a self-contained object.

It’s as though Drake and Gonzalez looked to collaborative books by Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb or Mirta Gomez and Edwardo del Valle. The photographers simultaneously claim and refute authorship, strip it down to its pictorial essence, while leaving a breadcrumb trail of hints that they were in fact working side by side. Shot/reverse shot is so effective that one searches for traces of the other photographer. Two perspectives on the same street corner, the same woman’s hand, or on another’s shoulder. Nearly identical shadows implying no more than a few seconds between exposures. There is no attribution to these photographs, so who took which is a fruitless, probably pointless, game.

It’s a treat and a trick at once, like a constructed image by a conceptualist like Barbara Probst. Who’s zoomin’ who, Aretha Franklin might ask.

In plain fact, the US Mexico border areas are laden with significance. Befitting Drake’s membership in the collective, a Magnum-esque earnestness is signaled. It’s a serious subject, to be sure. The issue buzzes with concern. Yet this politically dense tidbit is left until the end of the book.

Well, almost the end. The last page features an image that doubles down on doubling. A twin floral portrait (two flowers side by side) with a multiple exposure feel to it. Almost as though two images were made at the same time then superimposed in post-production. Or that supplemental light was used in concert with or in opposition to natural light. Despite its reveal-all, post-script positioning, it’s a red herring, perhaps the least interesting image in the book. An anticlimax, to be sure.

One element of the puzzle is tipped off in a lovely, enigmatic image of a black-robed figure standing on an embankment, flanked by glowing studio lights that light up without cords (the miracle of batteries and high luminescence LED lights). Seen at a distance, the figure could be an actor in a Beckett drama, or in a Greek chorus. What we derive from this image is outright evidence that artificial light is employed in the project’s overall strategy, and indeed it — the light, not the lighting devices — appears in image after image, a bit of estrangement, a hint of commercialism, within a generalized context of direct sun and twilight.

The book/puzzle forces us to take images at face value with the “border” caveat. We also must extend ourselves to regard the people in the photographs at face value. The book doesn’t tell us anything about anyone. For those seeking elucidation turn to this 2020 magazine article, but to look at that feels a little like cheating, like side-stepping the work the photographers are offering us.

Is there something more profound happening here? Need there be? Can't “serious” photographers (Drake and Gonzalez both qualify) have a moment of play? Admittedly, this is sophisticated play. Subtle and subversive. Still, when was the last time you had fun flipping through a photobook?

Did the lacy white fabric framed and leaning on a chair in a “museum” context lend its pattern to the book’s wraps? Are those two pigeons perched on the blue awning a reference to the photographic duo, or to Drake’s earlier book about birds? Remember, lace is full of air.

The photographers each make cameo appearances in the layouts. But can we assume that the portraits were actually made by the partner, or was each a selfie? Serious fun for certain close viewers. We follow the couple on a meander from here to there — points unspecified. The lingering brilliance of the journey is the trip itself, not the end product.

One must write in elliptical fashion about this work. It is factual and obtuse at once. I’m enjoying the idea of the photographers presenting it to the publisher. It’s about the border! Sort of. Yes. And.

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George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/

Image c/o Randall Slavin

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