Deb Achak – All the Colors I Am Inside

Review by Gerhard Clausing •

Seldom do we see a photobook in which the implementation is exquisitely and totally in unison with the concept. Deb Achak’s debut project presents a rare sequence in which this has been achieved.

Deb Achak was given final advice by her mother to always trust her instinct, and this book is a perfect implementation of that piece of advice. Achak’s “compulsion to capture real moments in time“ has resulted in a very personal series of photographs that touches the cosmic possibilities in all of us if we take a few moments to let these observations reach us. There is a great feeling of interconnectedness as we contemplate her moments in nature, moments of nature, and moments of individuals embedded in nature in a way that allow us to participate in their mysteries. Inner worlds are externalized through the images, for us to share, contemplate, interpret and extrapolate to our own external world.

Photographs challenge us best when they allow us to project into them and when they contain lots of ambiguity, in such a way as to permit the viewer a personal moment of recognition that connects to his or her past. Is that lady on the lake at ease and safe, or do we need to worry about her? What about those kids in motion, are they at one with nature, with themselves, with our climate of the future? What about that hand sticking out of the water on that coastline? And how about that fiery interruption in the forest? Mother Nature is certainly full of surprises and challenges our resourcefulness, often somehat unexpectedly, but may also lead us to creative solutions.

In her essay “Elixir,“ Alison Morley writes that this is a book about “the allure of life cycles,“ a project that allows us to look “forward and backward at the same time.“ The sequence is indeed well designed; the 56 images lead you along on a journey, contextualize each other, and make a coherent and inviting whole that involves us as viewers at the same time.

If we take the advice to “slow down, breathe deeply, and connect with the moment,” we contemplate these well-observed and well-printed glimpses of life, and we can become part of a well-designed safe space full of moments of meditation that can stimulate our emotions and creative thoughts.

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Gerhard Clausing, PhotoBook Journal Editor, is an author and artist from Southern California; he also sequesters himself in the Franconian countryside.

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Deb Achak – All the Colors I Am Inside

Photographer: Deb Achak (born in Montclair, NJ; lives in Seattle, WA)

Essays and Texts: Deb Achak, Alison Morley; poem by Jane Hirshfield

Language: English

Hardbound with embossed cloth cover; 112 pages, paginated, with 56 color images; 9.625 x 11.25 inches (24 x 28.5 cm); printed and bound in Germany; ISBN 978-3-96900-117-2

Editor: Alison Morley

Design: Pascale Willi

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.