Softcover with visible spine, Swiss binding, printrun: 500 copies, design by Martina Soffritti.

An exploration of friendship as a site of perception and disorientation

In Adam, Theo Zeal constructs a photographic work suspended between document and invention —a quiet yet disquieting meditation on friendship and the fragility of perception.

Developed over four years in the shadow of Lyme disease, the book traces the artist’s lifelong friend as he forages across the Isle of Mull. What begins as an act of following gradually becomes a means of orientation: a way to navigate the cognitive dissonance and perceptual instability brought on by illness.

The resulting images resist fixity. Through improvised darkroom processes—caffenol development, expired papers, unstable emulsions—Zeal produces prints that feel provisional, eroded, and materially contingent. They do not simply depict; they behave. Each image carries the trace of its own making, as though excavated rather than produced.

A pivotal gesture occurs in the work’s construction: photographs from Mull are interwoven with images made in the industrial estuaries of South East England. This collision dislocates the subject, situating Adam within a speculative terrain that is at once pastoral and abject, intimate and estranged. He appears as both presence and apparition—familiar, yet perpetually out of reach.

Conceived as a “found object,” Adam foregrounds the book as a tactile and temporal form. Its inconsistencies—of paper, tone, surface—are not incidental but constitutive, echoing the artist’s attempt to stabilise a shifting sense of self and to hold, however provisionally, an elusive other.

At its core, Adam is less a portrait than an inquiry: into how we see, how we anchor ourselves in others, and how images might register what resists articulation. It is a work shaped as much by absence as by presence—where friendship emerges not as a fixed subject, but as a quiet, sustaining force.

https://www.lartiere.com/en/prodotto/adam-theo-zeal/