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All the Colors I Am Inside By Deb Achak.
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Photographs by Deb Achak
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, 2023. 112 pp., 9½x11¼x¾".
Seattle-based photographer Deb Achak’s “debut monograph” (says her bio) feels like the first chapter of a longer story. It’s a work in progress. All the Colors I Am Inside is a tantalizing set of photographs implying various tactile experiences to be had. Inhale a verdant pine forest. Feel the cool stone by the creek, or the sun as it drapes over your shoulder. Enjoy the surprise of a bird’s nest grounded under a canopy of dandelions. Then, as the book ends, fireworks, watery submersion, a cloud of mist, and an ampersand moon (you must see it to understand) all hinting, like an ellipsis, of more to come. And, and, and, what? Book number two, I suppose.
Threads will advance in the second volume. We may learn more about the hazy, occluded figures who float through this book. There’s kinetic potential, which is currently, curiously, bound up, restrained somehow. Achak is keeping something at bay here — the fireworks are unseemly in their raucousness; the picture detonates like a classical catharsis, a bloody Shakespearean climax amidst a forest idyll.
Occlusion takes several forms. Where things have been, like a rectangular snow shadow (“Grass Carpet”). Something removed. A sense of yearning. Lots of darkness, occasional splashes and flashes of color. People partially seen. A world half realized. Hints of “culture” in the form of a light tracking through the woods and sprinklers at night owing their visibility to long exposures and human interventions.
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How do we know when things are ripe? What does ripe mean, really? Ready to consume. Having reached fulfillment, fullness.
Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Green Striped Melons,” used as an epigraph in this book, offers an exquisite key to unlocking Deb Achak’s photographs. “An unexpected weight,” Hirshfield offers, “the sign of their ripeness.” So good! Everyone knows that sensation. Pick up an orange, cantaloupe, tomato, a handful of grapes, and recognize that it is heavier than you expected. That’s density, a fruity liquid fullness that will spill forth with bite or slice.
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Achak’s photographs seek ripeness. There’s a quality of imminence in her images, a sense of things approaching peak but stopping just short of revelation. Hirshfield’s metaphor of weight is central. Achak is not afraid of darkness, the shadowy zones from which illumination rises. There must be darkness to appreciate light, right?
A while back on this blog (Thursday, July 1, 2021) I wrote about Cig Harvey’s ravishing colors in her monograph Blue Violet. Achak may be imagining such a full-blown spectacle. Wisps of color float about, suggesting chromatic conflagrations to come. (Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.)
Feel the weight. Stay tuned.
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George Slade, aka re:photographica, is a writer and photography historian based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. He is also the founder and director of the non-profit organization TC Photo. georgeslade.photo/Image c/o Randall Slavin