Tragic hilarity…
—Roe Ethridge

In a world that might seem washed up,
Other Nature is an encouragement to look again.
—Robert Adams

In his previous book, Alpine Star, photographer and publisher Ron Jude appropriated and recast a collection of his hometown newspaper photographs as a cryptically humorous meditation on the grey area between personal history and collective memory. Jude’s next series of photographs, Other Nature, adds a more intimate, diaristic strain to this line of inquiry, combining two separate sets of his own 4 x 5 color pictures (made between 2001 and 2008) to create a subtle and uncanny investigation of the “slippery threshold of narrative” in still images. Drawing on the concerns of the New Topographics photographers, Jude’s depictions of anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape could, on first glance, be taken for an ecological critique. But as the exterior and interior details of these environments (floral patterns, wood grain, sunlight) begin to activate, interrupt and inform each other, the book shifts into a more abstract, subjective register, provoking reflections on photography, the visible world and things hovering just outside our physical perception.