Jordan Gale – Long Distance Drunk

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

What is the difference between a photobook and a zine? When you consider it, there does not seem to be a clear line separating the two. For zines you think of something cheaply produced, sometimes handmade, in limited quantities, and with less focused and more informal content than books. Books you think of as professionally designed and printed, of higher quality execution, and showcasing a more focused and well-developed body of work. But it is an artificial distinction that involves basic design choices as well as status, prestige, and money. The package is the message, and it depends on your budget. How many well-established publishers, for example, are putting out editions of big-name photographers’ work in the form of zines? Pas beaucoup.

At PhotoBook Journal we usually review books rather than zines, and when I first saw Jordan Gale’s Long Distance Drunk, I dismissed it, thinking it more a sketchbook than a finished product. But after taking a longer look at what it was doing – and abandoning my preconceived idea – I had to admit that my first impression was wrong. Zine or book, what I took to be its lack of focus was actually an indication of its scope and inclusiveness. The fact that it was packaged a certain way was irrelevant to its narrative thrust. You could take its pages and put them between cloth-bound covers with embossed lettering and an inset photo and it would still pack a punch.

Several themes are developed in the book: sardonic observations of contemporary life, a dark take on our current social and cultural moment, and glimpses of first-person lived moments, including absurdity, intimacy, trauma, excess, and quiet reflection. In terms of social commentary, we see a pile of asphalt chunks, a ragged, lost-looking (homeless?) man, medics placing a man on an ambulance gurney, a man holding up a God Is Love cross on a street at night, and the trashed interior of a wrecked car. As for more personal views we see a young woman smiling conspiratorially over a table of drinks, a blurry hotel bedroom, someone’s feet resting out the back window of a parked car, and a hand-written welcome home note with a heart.

The title resonates in a couple of directions. With the photos of liquor and blurred roads, friends, and beds, it evokes insobriety, perhaps as a nihilistic escape from an ugly present. Jordan Gale is a photojournalist, and the long-distance dimension fits his being on assignments that require travel and covering newsworthy events such as the 2024 Democratic convention, taking photographs wherever he finds himself.

The photographs have been chosen and edited for impact rather than subtlety. They are mostly portrait orientations with a few landscapes and also more than a few full-bleed one or two-page spreads. Well-printed with rich tones on thick matt paper, the production does not feel low-end. You do not feel that anything has been sacrificed in terms of image quality.

More than the sum of its parts, as a journal and travelogue Long Distance Drunk covers a lot of territory in just 32 photographs. Like with a connect-the-dots puzzle, after you draw the lines between the photographic points you see the big picture.

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

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Jordan Gale – Long Distance Drunk

Photographer: Jordan Gale (born in 1993; lives in Portland)

Language: English

Text: Jordan Gale

Design: Jordan Gale

Printing: Conveyor Studio, New Jersey

Softcover; 32 photographs; Singer sewn binding, 48 pages, unpaginated; 8 x 10 inches

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