Overview

Backscatter is the reflection of particles, waves, or signals back to the direction from which they came: in underwater photography, back to the lens. The reflection, however, is diffuse, as opposed to clear like a mirror, thus softening images and even making them obscure. For this book, Tom Young has embraced backscatter as both subject and metaphor to render spaces below and above the water's surface-between here and there-in highly original ways. Our senses are awakened as Young creates images that evoke an evolutionary path from sea to land, that speak of a global environment increasingly threatened by human action, and that enlighten our consciousness with an abiding spirit larger than ourselves. In Young's previous book, the masterful Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed, the artist was drawn to the way multiple images can be assembled into a single photographic plate that both alters the intent and enhances the meaning of the individual images. Young has followed that same path in Backscatter, as the edge of one image is shared with the edge of another that simultaneously can fuse them into one voice or let them remain as separate voices, suggesting a deep conversation either way. As the sequence evolves, so, too, does the visual narrative whose assembly of diverse images presents unexpected relationships and an unforgettable storyline. Metaphorically, Backscatter is about looking head on into a void where what lies above and below the water's surface can seem harmonious yet helter-skelter. As John Rohrbach observes in his afterword, this is a ferocious book that brings us to a myriad places, each one real and imagined, conveying an overall sense of the human journey through life.

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9781938086380

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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.

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