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Leviathan

by Morgan Ashcom

Photographs: Morgan Ashcom

Publisher: Peperoni Books

74 pages

Pictures: 33 color

Year: 2015

ISBN: 978-3-941825-83-3

Price: 55 €

Comments: 29 x 29 cm. first edition, hardcover, 1 gatefold, clothbound with silk screen print, English.

A mighty strong book by American photographer Morgan Ashcom will be available soon. Here is what he has to say about it:

As a teenager, I couldn´t wait to escape the farm where I grew up. I traveled with friends to cities and towns with no plan and very little money, making our way as we went; sleeping in cars, on a stranger´s floor or pooling money for a hotel room. Those experiences stayed with me, and my desire to understand them drew me back to that life of escape, or some precise analogue thereof, years later to make photographs.

The photographs in Leviathan follow my experience of dislocation at a remote community in southeast Ohio. Inadvertently, I had found myself on another farm; a warped doppelganger of the one I had known growing up. Things seemed slightly altered of their identity and with this as my guide, I stepped away from a presumed knowledge of where I was. I followed aquatic themes emerging in my photographs, recalling stories of escape and confrontation with the unknowable on the sea; Ishmael´s flight from New York City aboard the Pequod or Jonah´s attempt to escape God´s will by boarding a ship bound for the far off land of Tarshish. Sometimes places of disparate cultures and geographies are linked. This connection lies beneath the surface, and its meaning is ambiguous. Even the Appalachian mountains looming around me got their name from the Native American word ›apala,‹ or ›great ocean.‹

The sequence of photographs in Leviathan suggests a subjective narrative where these worlds have converged.

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