Book Review: "Dry Eye Dripping Stone" by Line Bøhmer Løkken
“Do you have a book you would recommend?” — one of the questions I am asked most often at the shop.
Since I select every book myself, I stock each one believing it to be good, or at least promising. In that sense, everything on our shelves is a recommendation. But that hardly counts as an answer, so after explaining as much, I usually make suggestions based on the customer’s taste, or point to new arrivals and our classic titles.
In the case of 1 BOOKs, this text stands in for me, so that way of recommending is not possible. For this project, then, I choose a single book each time from a more personal point of view. This time, I would like to introduce the latest book by the Norwegian photographer Line Bøhmer Løkken, published last November by Multipress, the Norwegian independent publisher whose books IACK has carried since it was founded in 2017.
Spread from the book "Dry Eye Dripping Stone"
A few years ago, Løkken’s daughter lost the sight in one eye due to a tumour near the optic nerve. The event led Løkken to question her own way of being as a photographer. In time, she began to think about the two gazes that photography holds — the “optical gaze” and the “haptic gaze”.
The former refers to vision as an optical phenomenon, through the lens or the naked eye; the latter, it seems, to vision as image in the broad sense of printed matter, accompanied by texture and touch. And within the photobook — the medium she has worked with for many years — Løkken began attempting to fuse this haptic quality of photography with photography’s traditional semiotic and visual narratives.
Spread from the book "Dry Eye Dripping Stone"
That the book is dedicated to her daughter can be learnt from the short afterword. In that text, addressed to her daughter, Løkken writes that you have become something like a camera.
Unlike today’s digital cameras and smartphones, with which we shoot while looking at a monitor, the analogue camera she uses requires the photographer to look through the viewfinder with one eye — the image fixed, quite literally, through a “single-eyed” lens. The photographs collected in this book are scenes seen with one eye, just as her daughter sees. The reader touches the layered landscapes of Løkken’s stored memories, confirming their presence with hand and eye while reading on.
Spread from the book "Dry Eye Dripping Stone"
As the father of a daughter myself, and as a photographer, I have found myself thinking more often in recent years about conveying something through a work, rather than through direct communication between the people concerned. Seen from that perspective, this work makes me feel strongly the possibility and significance of art that lies beyond criticality or beauty.
Year by year, Løkken’s work has grown simpler, more pared down, more refined. While dealing with a personal event, this book holds both a warmth that embraces that difficulty and a quiet strength as a photographic work. It is a book to be read slowly, page by gently turned page, savouring it as you go.
Yukihito Kono (Photographer / IACK)
From a text written for “1BOOKs”, 11 January 2025.
Title: Dry Eye Dripping Stone
Artist: Line Bøhmer Løkken
Multipress, 2024
Hardcover
215 x 290 mm
96 pages
Text in English
First edition of 300 copies
¥7,590-
https://www.iack.online/en/products/signed-dry-eye-dripping-stone-by-line-bohmer-lokken