excerpts from
photo-eye | BLOG: Book Review: PASSAGE
by David Ondrik
Passage is an elegiac portrait of the artist’s family, infused with an open, tender love seen through flesh, cherished objects, and landscape. The care and attention required to use a large format film camera is evident — this is the product of labor and craft combined with a deep connection to what’s being photographed. Each of the five sections (Passage, Grounded, Simple Truths, Alchemy, and Becoming) is introduced by thick, textured paper embossed with Roman numerals. Immediately following each embossed page is a photograph on translucent vellum that overlays the image on the next page. This veiled, double exposure effect is a thoughtful accent that enhances the tactile interaction of turning through the pages. It shows an attention to the possibilities of the book as an interactive object, rather than a “pocket gallery” of photographs. There are short introductory statements from the artist that set the tone for each section.
excerpts from
PDN Book Review: PASSAGE
by David Walker
Photographs usually focus viewers’ attention on moments frozen in time, but the photographs of Linda Foard Roberts draw attention instead to those two eternities beyond the frame: the past and the future. And they do so with a deep sense of melancholy over the march of time, and its inevitable ravages. “The future is promising and holds only half of my gaze, as the other half is looking in the rearview mirror, at the life that will never come to pass again. A once anticipated future is now a string of memories held in the dim light,” Roberts writes in one of the philosophical asides of Passage, her new book published by Radius Books. In another, she quotes Richard R. Powell: “Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”