Snowmen

As his Spring, 2007 Cartier Foundation retrospective, The Air Is On Fire, made plain to all who saw it, the talents of the great American filmmaker David Lynch reach far beyond his acknowledged achievements in cinema: he is also an excellent painter, draughtsman and photographer. His photography to date has fallen loosely into four distinct genres or series: nudes (Bacon-esque images of digitally distorted Victorian photographs), still lifes (spark-plugs, dental machinery), industrial landscapes--and snowmen. Published to accompany the Cartier show, this compact volume brings together Lynch's black-and-white photographs of snowmen, all taken in the suburbs of his hometown of Boise, Idaho. Exhibiting his characteristic preoccupation with ominous beauty as these ephemeral folk sculptures decompose in front of snow-covered tract houses, Lynch pays scant regard to the cheerier and more genial properties of snowmen, and indeed some of these images will remind viewers of the shadowy black-and-white tones of Lynch's 1977 film Eraserhead. "If you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream," he has stated. Lynch's indisputable gift for teasing out the sinister flipsides of the props and rituals of American suburbia is beautifully evidenced in this small, gift-worthy book.