Transverse Path

Photographer Mike Slack lives and works in Los Angeles, and the images in this book were primarily made in the American south-west. They are concise and direct, yet driven by an emotional ambivalence that hovers between stark environmental dread and calm intimate reverie. Slack surveys an overheated terrestrial ecosystem, offering a luminous topography of monumental details and mundane vistas. Transcendental in mood, his vaguely sci-fi photographs envision a sun-blasted wilderness of synthetic and organic stuff, flourishing and disintegrating on its own terms, as if engaged in an ageless negotiation just beyond our grasp. Where does nature end and its opposite begin?