Customer Reviews

Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain

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"Thanks for the incredible book...best holiday gift I recieved this year."

This was the subject line from the note I got from a friend (architect and well known creative guru) I had recently purchased this book for. I got a copy from another friend when it first came out and found myself fully emerged in the incredible photography for countless hours (no joke!). I rarely if ever write product reviews but this one is worth writing about. Highly recommended.

What I love about this book is that it combines a variety of photographic modes -- portraits, landscapes, interiors, close-ups -- and merges them into a unified theme that gives the viewer a powerful message of environmental and economic transformation. I return again and again to the images, some because of their sheer beauty ("Rogue River", "Destruction Island"), others because of their poignancy ("The Sweater Store"), and others because of their compelling subjects (several of Missy, "Storefronts"). Whatever your interests, I believe you will find this book a treasure.

I recently saw Johnson's work on display at the Henry Art Gallery. His work describes a heretofore undocumented aspect of American history. Shown alongside historic photos of the Pacific Northwest from early pioneer days, one gets a sense of the place in history that Johnson's work claims.

For hundreds of years people have been hunting, gathering, farming, scavenging, building dams, logging, developing housing and even selling Star Wars memorabilia in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Now someone has documented these people and the land they rely on. A mix between the work of Ansel Adams and Robert Franks, this work is as important as Franks' "The Americans" Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, Expanded Edition and as beautiful as Adams' "California". California: With Classic California Writings

Fans of Raymond Carver's work would enjoy a rainy day with Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories and Johnson's book as a complement. As to claims that the artist is trying to cash in on some environmental movement, I don't see it. This work brings the reader and viewer a real slice of America that many people would otherwise never get to see due to the inaccessible nature of so much of the Northwest.

I've been following the author's work since seeing it in a San Francisco gallery. The work focuses on the physical space - inner-city, urban fringe, or in the case of this book, outer rural environments - which are influenced and altered by the people who live among them. In Sawdust Mountain, the author is able to observe the indelible beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the impacts of the people who - right or wrong - survive from its resources. After ingesting these poignant photos, you are left with a bit of heartache: for the natural wonder of these places, the people who find home in its beauty, and lastly their struggle to simultaneously preserve and live off its resources.

Some of my favorite photos convey the depth and scale of these places: the old abandoned passenger/freight train being enveloped by nature; expansive rivers and timber log jams; the drive-in movie screen reflecting - what? - a setting sun?; and the mildly disturbing star wars paraphernalia sales guy. The photos capture the spectrum...thumbs up.

I finally did it and picked up a copy of Sawdust Mountain after reading about it as one of the best artful photography books of 2009 on the Wall Street Journal's Holiday Book Guide. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, the photos strike a chord with me and captures the tension between a sustainable and healthy forest system and those that have come to rely on the forest for their economy. The photos within the book, apart from being stunning in their own right, lend their voice to both the trees and the people of the northwest without taking sides. Sawdust Mountain, as the cover suggests, mediates a dialogue within oneself on the need for balance and the essay by Tess Gallagher echos the lingering imbalance.

Probably the best photographic book I have ever reviewed of a subject in the northwest. Mr Johnson has grabbed the essence of the northwest experience in the most eloquent manner one can imagine in a photo essay. I eagerly await his forthcoming works.

Eirik Johnson's book serves as an unbiased observation of the inter-workings of the Pacific Northwest forest industry and hits it's mark well. Far from the environmental battlegrounds of Olympia, Seattle, or Washington DC, Eirik's images show life in and around the forest industry in it's raw state: second growth stands awaiting harvesting or the cedar salvager working post harvest to make shakes. The book strikes the balance between what was and what will be; the heyday of the big trees may be gone from the sawmill, the clatter concerning the spotted owl silent (hushed--it seems--by the rain itself), and homes left abandoned (its past inhabitants searching for perhaps sunnier days?), but life does indeed persist. Either in the eggs of the salmon to be or in the earnest pride in the face of the future Star Wars convention attendee, the book lays bare the forest and its inhabitants for what it is; a working ecosystem where consumption, preservation, conservation, and industry readily co-exist, where people live in, not apart from, the ecosystem.

Many photographers, attempting to gain cashe for their images align themselves with environmental causes. It appears to be to be the case here. Images of varying interest and a plaintive rambling story does not justify the price.