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"Wide-ranging and operatic in scale and in scope, Our Time on Earth - Tom Young's fourth book - is an intuitive gaze at the mystery, promise, and condition of human life on Earth in 2020. In an expansive collection of eighty-three new photographs, artfully sequenced into thematic parts, Young brings to us a visual narrative that simultaneously hints at the apocalyptic unfolding of contemporary life while offering reverential hope for a better world. Through a collision of images as minute as a molded snow globe, as expansive as a roiling ocean, and as haunting as steam belching from the tower of a nuclear power plant, Young brings the reader on an epic journey. Here one finds the prayerful silence of a goat at peace in a freshly dug grave, the human tableaux of young people amidst the drenching power of water, and the simple magnificence of moving water frozen into icy stillness. Here as well one finds disturbing aspects of the human mosaic to be found in the common places of everyday life, from a school bus abandoned in a vast mined landscape to a collapsing building in the shape of a large cat. In Tom Young's universe, juxtaposition tells a story while the precise rendering of a moment in time speaks to the mystery of creation and the devotion of a photographer trying to understand a complicated world. As curator Aprile Gallant observes in her insightful essay: "The images build upon the other, veering from macro to micro, from vegetable, animal, and mineral to welded, constructed, and manufac-tured . . . The aggregate of viewing is an awareness of the deep interconnectedness of humans and their environment, a drama that plays out in equally beneficial and devastating ways."--Jacket flap.
About the author
Tom Young was born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. He is currently a professor of art, emeritus, at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He has been awarded an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four Artist Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Polaroid International Collection in Offenbach, Germany, and Harvard University's Fogg Museum. Young's work has been exhibited internationally, including the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Frans Hals Museum in Harlem, The Netherlands, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, and the National Museum of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In addition to Recycled Realities, he is the author of Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012). His photographs have also appeared in a number of publications, including Artworks: Tom Young (Williams College Museum of Art), American Perspectives (Tokyo Museum of Photography), Goodbye to Apple Pie (DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts), and 2 to Tango: Collaboration in Recent American Photography(International Center of Photography). He resides in Buckland, Massachusetts.
Summary
Tom Young’s most ambitious photo book to date renders our time on Earth in new ways.
