josef chladek

on photobooks and books

Jackie Nickerson - Contact Sheet 174 - Terrain, Light Work, 2013, New York

Softcover, catalogue for the exhibition „Terrain“ (November 5 - December 20, 2013) at the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work.

Jackie Nickerson makes photographs that examine the essential nature of people and their relationship to the earth, through the physical and psychological condition of living and working on the land. With her exhibition Terrain, Nickerson revisits eastern and southern Africa, focusing on how the exertions of labor leave traces on people and their environment. Nickerson’s contemplative portraits and landscapes beg us to consider our own relationship to the earth and to the food we consume. Here, hands and plants, limbs and fabric, bodies and soil hold close to one another; the subjects of Nickerson’s portraits are, in the fullest sense, terrene—of the earth. The workers are obscured by the sheer size and weight of their harvest. Portraits not about individual identity but function photographic sculptures of labor, at once empowering and uneasy. “It is about us in the landscape,” says Nickerson, “how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human and how, for better and for worse, the habitus that we make, in turn, changes who we are.” (taken from Light Work)

Pages: 48
Place: New York
Year: 2013
Publisher: Light Work
Size: 23 x 25 cm (approx.)