Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude

Issue 39

Lick Creek Line is the third installment in a trio of projects about my childhood home of central Idaho (preceded by Alpine Star and emmett). Although there’s an element of narrative in most of the individual images, the pictures ultimately find their meaning through the structure of the book. (I can’t overstate how important books have been to all three of these projects. In fact, it’s safe to say that none of them would have come to fruition without the book to give them form.)

The primary subject in Lick Creek Line is a fur trapper checking his trap line, but the tenor of the piece is apolitical and reaches beyond the activity of trapping. Its internal structure simultaneously (and paradoxically) resembles both a traditional photo-essay-type narrative, and a non-linear stream-of-consciousness. Although the photographs are, for the most part, clear and descriptive, I don’t consider this work to be documentary. I think of this project as equal parts prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. The story is derived from actual events, in an actual place, but the book does little to summarize this information into something tidy and digestible. Instead, it’s meant to allude to the improbability of discerning meaning through the texture of sensory experience, and by extension, through photographs.

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Ron Jude is an Ithaca, NY based photographer and teacher.
To view more of Ron's work, please visit his website.