Ron Jude - Fires

This photo book seamlessly weaves together the disparate strands of American photographer Ron Jude s three-part look at his childhood home of Central Idaho. Pulling equal parts from Alpine Star (2006), emmett (2010), and Lick Creek Line (2012), Jude fleshes out the consistent tone and crossover between what appear on the surface to be three incongruent projects. An aging fur trapper, a young man on the threshold of adulthood in the early 1980s and an entire community (as represented by a weekly newspaper) converge through the repeating motif of a woodland landscape. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Backstory (2013) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, Fires functions not as a catalog, but as a self-contained piece that exploits photography s tendency to continuously tip away from empiricism into the realm of the prose poem.