NEW YORK, NY.- A culmination of four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, Eirik Johnson抯 Sawdust Mountain (Aperture, June 2009) 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 industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Eirik Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future梟o longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old growth forests. Johnson, a Seattle native, describes his photographs as 揳 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, aspects of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.
Eirik Johnson (born in Seattle, 1974) is an assistant professor of photography at the 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.
Tess Gallagher (essay) is the author of fifteen books, including Moon Crossing Bridge, poetic elegies to her late husband Raymond Carver.
David Guetrson (poem) was born in Seattle in 1956. His novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle will host an artist talk and book signing with the artist and author, Saturday, May 9th coinciding with the G. Gibson Gallery show opening.
Aperture Bookstore in New York will host an artist talk and book signing with Eirik Johnson, May 26, 2009.
