Linda Foard Roberts: Passage is a compilation of five series, created over the past ten years. Roberts works in enduring genres – landscape, portrait and still life – and photographs her 21st-century surroundings using 4x5, 5x7 and 8x10 cameras and vintage lenses, some over 100 years old. The result is seemingly eternal, timeless, black-and-white photography that exploits the peculiar ability of the camera to produce images that are both extremely present and yet suspended in time. Over the last decade, Roberts has been exploring the inevitable movement of time in life, focusing on memory and the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The photographs in this volume, Roberts’ first monograph, are meant to be read like visual lines in a poem, metaphorical and layered, with each photograph bestowing a deeper meaning upon the next. In addition to Roberts’ photographs and writing, there are quotes from photographers and writers who have inspired her: Sally Mann, Emmet Gowin, Aaron Siskind, Elliott Erwitt, Thomas Wolfe, and Billy Collins.
All images in the book are limited edition gelatin silver photographs.
Radius Books, Santa Fe, USA, 2016. 176 pp., 80 black-and-white illustrations, 10" x 12". Poem by Billy Collins, Essays by Russell Lord, and Deborah Willis.
“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
Click image above to enlarge and preview Passage.
“When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground. The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest. This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hare, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, source of inspiration.)”