Review by Hans Hickerson ·
Michael E. Northrup’s photobook Over the Electric Grapevine lives up to the Pynchonesque promise of its title: weird, wild, and wonderful.
The book is an album of photographs made from 1972 to 2004. Northrup employed an evolving repertoire of techniques – too many to list, but including straight photography – rather than a single formula or approach. The photos are organized into six groups: Fragments One, Rehearsal of Truth, Fragments Two, The Tuning Path, Beguiling the Hours, and Mind Flowers. My impression is that the groups roughly correspond to images from the same time period. Styles and techniques overlap, but the images are unified by Northrup’s distinctive vision and taste.
Northrup delights in thumbing his non-conformist nose at conventional notions of beauty. His photos highlight the odd, off-kilter, confounding, unexpected, accidental, unsettling, mysterious, surreal, shocking, and gross. Are photos supposed to be sharp? Let’s make things blurry. Are you supposed to see the faces of the people in the photos? Let’s take a photo with a cat covering a woman’s face. Here’s a naked lady on a toilet. Let’s make it more memorable by putting a large catfish in the toilet water. Here’s a baby being dragged on the floor by the drawstring of its sleepwear. And how about a shot of a lizard clinging to a man’s genitals?
They may be odd but many of the pictures are strikingly memorable. They stick in your mind and do not go away.
About halfway through the book the photos switch to color. The first photos work like the monochrome images. An unsmiling man in a suit and bowtie gestures with a long, shiny knife. A bare-chested, wrinkled, grinning man with crooked teeth stands in front of a pile of burning tires. A gutted pig with its intestines spilling out is paired with a photo of a woman holding up her shirt to reveal her torso.
Later, in “Mind Flowers,” Northrup projects colors onto his scenes, or onto elements of his scenes. A pair of red hands point across a river to a house. Nude models painted with red light pose in natural surroundings. The last images are a kaleidoscope of colors projected onto spooky, dramatic, and macabre scenes, including a body lying in a coffin.
Again, weird, but also weirdly impactful.
What do Northrup’s images mean? Like other successful works of art, they resonate metaphorically in multiple directions and it would be foolish to try to assign them fixed interpretations. A better idea is to appreciate them for what they seem to say. For me a few fall flat but others pack a punch and hit home.
Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.
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Michael E. Northrup – Over the Electric Grapevine
Photographer: Michael E. Northrup (American, born 1948)
Publisher: Zone Publishing © 2026
Language: English
Design: Ali Besikci
Printing: Offset Yaimevi
Softcover with French flaps; 55 photographs; Swiss binding, 300 pages, unpaginated; 20 x 25 cm, ISBN 979-12-985895-9-9
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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.
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