Pine Tree Ballads

Published by Candela Books, Richmond, Virginia, March 2019. Hardcover, 9.75 × 9.75 in., 198 pages, 100 plates. Afterword by the poet Dora Malech. Edition of 750.

Edition of 750. Signed and unsigned copies are available from Candela Books.

A decade-long photographic project and monograph built from a century of family summers at a farmhouse on an island off the coast of Maine. Photographs, inherited stories, family history, folklore and my writing move between documentary fact and the imaginary.

Here I developed what I call doculiterary: documentary in which meaning accumulates through sequence, metaphor, association and recurrence rather than residing in any single photograph.

In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather settled on an island off the coast of Maine because it resembled his homeland of Sweden. My family has returned to Gray's Point each summer for over a century.

He told detailed stories of the first settlers of the apple orchard farm: a one-legged ship's cook, a widowed schoolteacher, an ingenious Native American blacksmith. The tales mixed fact and lore, and could turn a creaking floorboard or a shadow into an ancestor.

My decade-long photographic opus of more than 200 images is a poetic memoir that embraces this spirit of magic realism.

Solo exhibitions at United Photo Industries, Brooklyn (2013), Workspace Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska (2016) and Candela Gallery, Richmond (2019). Shown at the Noorderlicht Photofestival (2014) and the Benaki Museum, Athens (2016). Renaissance Photography Prize, Best Series (2016); Critical Mass Top 50 (2015); Hariban Award Honorable Mention (2015).