Elementary Calculus ─ J. Carrier

A photobook exploring displacement, distance and fragile ideas of home through portraits, landscapes and still lifes.

Elementary Calculus is a photobook by American photographer J. Carrier, made in response to his encounters with immigrants and refugees in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Having lived a nomadic life across Washington, D.C., Ecuador, Africa and the Middle East, Carrier found in their condition an overlap with his own experience of physical and psychological distance from home. Through a sequence of portraits, landscapes and still lifes, the book quietly observes those “public yet private” moments in which people in transit attempt to recover a connection to their homeland. In doing so, Carrier explores the distance between reality and desire—between longing for what once was and hope for what might still arrive.

Marked by restraint and emotional clarity, Carrier’s photographs resonate with the feeling that geographical distance eventually loses any stable measure, and that “home” begins to recede into something like memory or dream. Set against the politically and historically charged landscape of Israel and the West Bank, the work poses questions rather than offering resolution: what does the arrival of foreigners mean in a land shaped by competing claims of identity, territory and belonging, and what kind of promise, if any, can such a place hold for those newly displaced?

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Title: Elementary Calculus
Artist: J. Carrier
Publisher: MACK, September 2012
Format: Embossed hardcover
Size: 210 × 250 mm
Pages: 112
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 9781907946233