Book Review
Meridian
By Colin Stearns
Reviewed by Adam Bell
If all photographs are afterimages — traces and disclosures of an ever-changing world — what is gained by foregrounding this fact? Always previous and elsewhere, images reveal people we’ve known, know or may never meet, as well as places we’ve been or may never visit. They linger, reinforce or displace memories, and come back in unexpected ways.
Reviewed by Adam Bell
Meridian
Photography by Colin Stearns
RITA, New York City, USA, 2015. 140 pp., 82 black-and-white illustrations, 6x8¼".
If all photographs are afterimages — traces and disclosures of an ever-changing world — what is gained by foregrounding this fact? Always previous and elsewhere, images reveal people we’ve known, know or may never meet, as well as places we’ve been or may never visit. They linger, reinforce or displace memories, and come back in unexpected ways. A personal reflection on the vagaries of photographic vision, Colin Stearns’ self-described photo-novel
Meridian gathers three years of peripatetic images taken in France and New York City. Modest and unassuming, the images follow the life of a young man on the move with a camera. Alone and restless, he gazes at the world from a distance and moves through a landscape of foreign cities, parks and wilderness, and the confines of anonymous hotel rooms and flats. Less romantic autobiography and more philosophical missive,
Meridian points to a past that is slipping away and yet held still in mute images.