Tim Carpenter: Little

An unassuming sequence of 42 medium-format photographs depicting slivers of the semirural landscape of Central Illinois

Tim Carpenter’s (born 1968) Little is a visual memoir that completes a trilogy rooted in the sensibility and approach to the practice of “camera” he elaborated in the best-selling, book-length essay To Photograph Is to Learn How to Die (2022). In other words, he steadfastly upholds photography’s capacity to bridge the gap between self and other, and to cultivate meaning in an alienating world. Less formally rigorous than Local Objects (2017) and less introspective and linear than Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, this new installment channels the perspective of a child’s meandering mind, open to possible meanings, absorbing whatever the eyes encounter—marks, buildings, branches, paths, the daylight of a Central Illinois afternoon—nascent symbols everywhere, fleeting images improvised of mind and matter. Adapting a style in the lineage of the New Topographics photographers—Robert Adams, John Gossage and Lewis Baltz—these black-and-white photographs are affecting in their minimalism, imbuing poignance within the banal composites of the Midwestern landscape. The volume itself is beautifully produced with a flush-cut cover treatment and a foil-stamped title.