Book of the Week: A Pick by Jim Stone

Book of the Week Book of the Week: A Pick by Jim Stone Jim Stone selects The Life of Small Things by Adam Ekberg as Book of the Week.

The Life of Small Things. 
By Adam Ekberg. Waltz Books, 2015.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Jim Stone who has selected The Life of Small Things by Adam Ekberg from Waltz Books.

"Not being a fan of television sitcoms, I never watched Seinfeld, but by longevity and success it managed to seep into my cultural consciousness. What stayed with me was the near-universal description of it as 'a show about nothing.'

Something similar could be said about the photographs in Adam Ekberg’s The Life of Small Things, but it would be doing Ekberg — and the book — a great disservice. His work does not aspire to raise our awareness of conflict, exotic places, society’s failures, or the heights and depths of human emotion. None of the serious literary themes of our time are present, but it is a remarkable accomplishment nonetheless.

Published with high production values and understated elegance by Waltz Books, The Life of Small Things is evidence of one man’s imagination and the perseverance to manifest it photographically. Much of photography’s traditional significance stems from its ability to record the observations of a perceptive practitioner. But this book presents nothing we’d ever bump into or even think about accidentally, just Ekberg’s charming and quirky inventiveness. These apparently simple images, if we begin to think about his craft, reveal themselves as remarkably complex. He runs electricity and carries a smoke machine into a remote snow-covered forest to illuminate a disco ball and somehow the lunacy makes sense to us. Ekberg, like a skilled dancer, makes it look easy and — almost — natural."—Jim Stone

Purchase book

The Life of Small Things. By Adam Ekberg. Waltz Books, 2015.

The Life of Small Things. By Adam Ekberg. Waltz Books, 2015.

Jim Stone, a photographer, teacher, and author, turned to photography while studying engineering at MIT. His photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. Six of his textbooks are in wide and continued use for university-level photography courses and have been translated into several languages. There are three artist’s books of his photographs, Stranger Than Fiction (Light Work, 1993), Historiostomy (Piltdown Press, 2001), and Why My Pictures are Good (Nazraeli Press, 2005). He is currently Professor of Photography at the University of New Mexico and was named the 2016 Honored Educator by the Society for Photographic Education.

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