How long should mourning last? Could you tell me the prescribed timeframe for a loved one’s passing to be followed by a resolution? The fallacy of the human condition regarding loss suggests that one can move on from a significant loss, when in reality, as the metric is difficult to ascertain, mourning, from my perspective is that it is a lasting and integral part of our process of being. To suggest otherwise, in bare honesty, would be to indicate a type of sociopathy possibly.
Resolve is an indeterminate word, like a flippant attempt to grasp absolutes. In reality, nothing is resolved when it comes to the death of a loved one. There is no moving on. It is woven into our condition. There may be a form of acceptance that differs from suggesting a resolution. To accept death is closer to the a form of reality independent of un-closure, unless one believes in religion or the afterlife. I don’t. I don’t see the point in holding out on the premise that all my troubles will be solved by St. Peter, holding court over the door in an ascendent Berghain. Nor would I want in on that party, all respect to those who do.
Regarding TR Ericsson’s archive of dissolution, the effect of mourning provides an inherent state of creativity. That is not to downplay the impact of mourning or loss, but if one looks at the processing of lament in Ericsson’s work, it becomes clear that mourning is a natural and ongoing consideration and that there is a confrontation of death in the work. Arguably, it is a form of escapism. I see it instead as a type of enduring elegy. I can’t imagine being so close to the bone, literally and figuratively, and not coming to some form of closure through the effort. It suggests that the ultimate position between art and mourning is how we endure.
In Crackle and Drag, Ericsson’s huge catalog from 2015 covered much of his work that memorialized the suicide death of his mother in 2003 through sculpture, archival imagery, and media, as well as his use of her remains (ash) in his printing process. Ash and smoke have become more critical in the artist’s work. Inevitably, ash is finite, nicotine not as much. Through an elaborate process of using the smoke from nicotine to produce a photographic image on paper, Ericsson’s series of nicotine paintings? Photographs? Prints? use archival imagery from his mother’s archive to create works based on her life and story and his proximity to it. They are significant in their dissolution. Instead of simply regurgitating images from the archive, this extra step of using smoke to recreate the images suggests a type of memento mori, a reminder of how fleeting life is amid our robust engagement with it. They are not warnings, premonitions built on fear, but instead present as reminders to hold your close ones tight and to prepare.
Nicotine, recently published by eminent American house TBW as a book, is a welcome follow-up to Tom’s Crackle and Drag. It is situated less as a catalog of one portion of his work and should be valued as an art object, which is how his work, like Rauschenberg’s, is to be understood. Due to its proximity to human belief and relatability, photography, as a medium, has, for better AND worse, an inescapable and tenuous association to be read as documents or slivers of something “real.” This has always been its crutch and its strength.
In thinking about Ericsson’s decision to remove photography in one to two steps, depending on the permutation of his work, we begin to consider it more as a monumental art form, a cross-medium with an ability to be read as form and content, not document. This decision reflexively suggests a subjectivity but also a desire to be loosened from the context of the photo album/archive to the gallery wall. It is a communal process, more universal than one would expect from a trove of personal family photographs. With Ericsson’s work, we are asked to think through the pain and emotion and consult the image for its conceptual load and relationship to aesthetics.
What is unique about Nicotine, outside of the images within, which capture Ericsson’s nicotine paintings of his mother and her life, is how it is put together. Something aligned in the vein of Lee Friedlander’s American Monuments, the book plays with the notion of tactility that suggests something like a cross between a family album and, further, a deep dive toward early American photographic periodicals of the twentieth Century with its tip-in images. It would not be too strained to suggest a nod toward The Studio, an American periodical showcasing the best in international art that used similar photographic tip-ins. I might also mention a nod to the preciousness found in Camera Work by Stieglitz.
This is an artist book, no matter the edition size. The velvet cover adds a tactile feature that reminds one of the era from which most of the images come from. It is again a possible stretch, but I am also reminded of velvet paintings from the 60s and 70s when I hold it, or perhaps nicotine-stained curtains, referential to smoking. Each component, from the binding to the tactility of the object, has been thought through and persists in allowing the viewer to consider possibilities. These choices do not overly lock it down and do allow some air in for a viewer to project onto the work.
Referencing books that approximate Nicotine is difficult, which is a sure sign of the magic of a publication that is not easy to place. Some of this comes from Tom’s work, which is challenging to place on the spectrum of art production, but we do not have many similar points of reference in photobooks as a medium. I believe I have mentioned Thomas Sauvin’s Until Death Do Us Part and Lucy Sante’s book Smoking previously.
Two further oblique references to the work are Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu (The Map) from 1965, which alludes to the stains of Hiroshima visible in the city on the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bomb drop. From here, I also perceive my connection to the Human Shadow Etched in Stone, the eponymous silhouette of a man whose body, evaporated by the blast of the Hiroshima bomb, left a shadow on the stone steps of the Sumitomo Bank. This serves as a poignant reminder of the bomb’s devastating power, but also as a form of human photogram, even a stain, capturing the moment when ordinary people were awakened to planetary existentialism.
Nicotine signifies a stellar year for TBW, highlighted by the launch of several essential titles. With Nicotine and Christian Patterson’s Gong Co., there is a renewed emphasis on valuing books in their material form, more than in previous years. This trend is likely to impact the future as the photobook market finds itself in a precarious state that few are addressing. A focus on quality and hand-crafted, or seemingly hand-crafted, titles in smaller editions will likely guide the way forward after years of being flooded with numerous titles, many of which have been mediocre, if not most.
It’s time to elevate the photobook medium to a more refined mode of production, regardless of the edition’s scale. We must acknowledge the reality of pricing and the size of our audience. Nicotine fulfills this need and provides Ericsson with a way to create monographs that highlight his practice on a granular level, allowing his audience to find comfort in an object of empathy—highest recommendation.
