Adam Thorman – Creatures Found

Review by Hans Hickerson •

Photography is a surprising medium. You think that everything has been done already, that you have seen it all, and – surprise – along comes something original. Who knew? Maybe it has been done before, but Adam Thorman’s photobook Creatures Found was a new one for me.

What Thorman has done is look around and see things – shapes, forms, textures, colors – that look like life forms, mostly imaginary. Rocks, roots, trees, shadows, sand, bark, paint, plants, wood, water, cloth, furniture, a fence, a jellyfish, a dry mount press, a stump, and a hedge become eyes, arms, mouths, faces, heads, skulls, bodies, lizards, Orcs, Ents, space aliens, and spirits.

Who knew to look for such things? Who even knew that they were out there to be seen?

Adam Thorman did. His catalogue of 18 years of finds, some 117 examples in all, provides evidence of what must have been a near-obsession. Works of the imagination as well as the eye, the images are by turns surprising, spooky, delightful, and fantastic, and one imagines that they would make Hieronymus Bosch happy.

My first time looking at the book I got perhaps half of the images, as some are easier reads than others. But the more I looked the more I saw, and now there are only a handful that I haven’t figured out. What I see however may not be what someone else sees, given that there are quite a few that you can decipher in more than way.

At roughly 6.5 by 8.5 inches Creatures Found is not coffee-table sized but rather compact and intimate. An example of thoughtful editing and design from publisher The Eriskay Connection, its varied page layouts and pacing sustain the viewer’s interest and its clever fold-out cover is nothing short of astonishing.

Accessible to humans ages 3 to 133, Creatures Found is itself a rare creature, a photobook requiring no explanation.

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Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Adam Thorman – Creatures Found

Photographer: Adam Thorman (born in California in 1981)

Poem: Zachary Schomburg

Language: English

Design: Rob van Hoesel

Production: Fine Books – Jos Morree and Wilco Art Books

Softbound bound with Swiss-bound illustrated cover; 180 pages; 110 color, 7 B/W photographs; unpaginated; 215 x 170 mm; printed and bound in the Netherlands by Wilco Art Books; ISBN 978-94-93363-11-3

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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.