John Volynchook – Faultlines – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Context is everything, and without it you are lost. If you look at the 48 photographs in John Volynchook’s Faultlines by themselves, you would not know what country you were in, or even what century. They depict timeless views of nature, all except two photographs where you see tractor tire tracks in a muddy field and another where you see, in the distance, tiny people walking across an immense expanse of wet beach.

A botanist might be able to situate the photographs geographically, while most of us would conclude only that they were made in a temperate climate. They certainly do not represent the Foggy Albion of my imagination, with its pastoral landscapes of chalk streams, hedgerows, and contentedly grazing sheep. Other than the aforementioned outliers, Volynchook’s images read like Eliot Porter nature photographs, but in black and white.

Nature photographs, exquisite photographs, but presented in the context of fracking surveys and proposals to begin producing natural gas in the United Kingdom, where the areas surveyed and to be exploited are identified by a system of letters and numbers that have also been used as titles. Viewed with this lens, instead of natural beauty preserved for future generations we see natural beauty objectified as commodity and threatened with damage and destruction.

The photographs themselves are achingly beautiful, their tones precisely rendered in rich blacks and gleaming whites on heavy, cream-colored matt paper. We see overall views and details of trees and forests, flowers and ferns, roots and rocks, branches and buds, mushrooms and moss. Many of the photographs were made in winter or early spring, with a smaller number of summer pictures.

There are several views of water with reflections of trees or sky for which I have a particular weakness, for example the photo in the fifth page spread reproduced below. Here you see through foliage, into the water, onto the water, and up at things reflected in the water. Be careful. The shimmering cloud-like form of blank white sky in the center is a portal to somewhere else. If you lean too far over the photo you might fall in.

The book’s title does double duty. It refers to geological fault lines and to the social and political tensions surrounding fracking. You also wonder if there isn’t a third interpretation, namely “fault” as in “culpability.” Whose fault is the mess that has been made of our planet?

In Faultlines, Volynchook invites us to slow down and look – look closely – and to sit down and think. Isn’t this precious? Isn’t this a treasure? Do we really want this to disappear?

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

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John Volynchook – Faultlines

Photographer: John Volynchook (born in 1958, lives in the UK)

Text: Helen Baczkowska

Design: GOST

Printing: EBS, Italy

Language: English

Hardbound with cloth cover; sewn binding; 88 pages; 48 B/W photographs; 23 x 29 cm; ISBN 978-1-915423-31-3

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