Ron Jude: Fires

Ron Jude: Fires
10.5 x 8.25 inches
52 Pages, Softcover/Catalog 25 Color, 13 b&w Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9703860-8-3
Publisher: Ram Publications (2013)

Ron Jude’s Fires seamlessly weaves together the disparate strands of his three-part look at his childhood home of Central Idaho. Pulling equal parts from Alpine Star (2006), emmett (2010), and Lick Creek Line (2012), Jude fleshes out the consistent tone and crossover between what appears on the surface to be three incongruent projects. An aging fur trapper, a young man on the threshold of adulthood in the early 1980s, and an entire community (as represented by a weekly newspaper), converge through the repeating motif of a woodland landscape. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Backstory at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, Fires functions not as a catalog, but as a self-contained piece that exploits photography’s tendency to continuously tip away from empiricism into the realm of the prose poem.

Jude was born in Los Angeles in 1965, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives in upstate New York. His photographs have been exhibited at venues including the Daugeu Cultural Center (Daugeu, South Korea), the Dodd Art Center, the George Eastman House Project Space, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Jude is the co-founder of A-Jump Books and the author of Alpine Star, Postcards, Other Nature and emmett. His photographs have been reproduced in Blind Spot, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker and Doubletake, among others.