Tin Roof Press, Kansas City, 2009.
80 pp, 77 color illustrations, softbound, 9 ¾” x 7 ¾”
Edition of 100 

Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at Urban Culture’s Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City,  this book brings together two longtime friends and colleagues Colby Caldwell and Elijah Gowin.  Tied together through their innovative inquiry of the materiality of photography, both artists use painstaking and elaborate processes for reaching their final images. The images circle around themes of anxiety, loss, and the tenuous beauty of living. Often drawing from North Carolina family snapshots and found movie footage, Colby Caldwell combines still photographs with video pieces to consider the ideas of nostalgia and memory, and how they are embedded in the practice of photography.  Elijah Gowin’s digitally constructed photographs show figures drifting in water or falling through the air, either accepting what is happening to them with grace or reacting instead with panic.  Together, both sets of artworks present a kindred search for wholeness and weighted beauty.