My initial reaction to Morgan Ashcom’s book, Open, was one of curiosity. I was immediately intrigued by the clever packaging: the all-too familiar yellow box, perfectly sealed with red tape labeled “WARNING EXPOSED FILM: OPEN IN A DARK ROOM ONLY.” The reference was clear, and even though I knew that the box contained a book, not exposed film as it boasted, I had just the slightest hesitation cutting through the tape. Such a compelling design decision created a playful viewer interaction and set a tone of fascination and mystery for the book.
When I opened the box, I was met with a soft, welcoming book. The smooth black cover is beautifully accented by the silver-embossed caligraphic title – printed larger and centered in Arabic, and smaller and at the bottom of the page in English. The book feels familiar in your hands; the size and simple saddle-stitch has a well-crafted, hand-made feel that’s reminiscent of a treasured journal.
The intimacy that’s established by the tactile elements is interrupted by the opening sequence, where semi-translucent sheets of paper alternate with positive prints from 4x5 Kodak Portra NC160 film, veiling the content between spreads and inviting further examination. There’s a nice visual transition between these first three prints that establishes a poetic narrative. The left three-quarters of the first image is black with the right quarter showing an amber color field and a hint of photographic information; the second image is split in half tonally, and the third image shifts with the left three-quarters filled with the bright, amber color and black on the right edge. This opening is very simple, but powerful, and the transition in the images speaks to movement and migration, boundary and division.
In these first three spreads the viewer is given a bit of breathing room with plenty of space to maneuver between the blank semi-translucent paper and the abstraction available in the images. Our eyes rest. We take a breath.
We are then met with the text of “The Passport” by renowned Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. The display of the poem is carefully balanced with printing on the frontside of the semi-translucent paper in Arabic, and on the backside in English. I was unfamiliar with this work, and responded most to the last stanza which reads:
True masters! Honorable prophets!
Don’t ask the trees about their names.
Don’t ask the wadis about their mothers.
From my forehead gushes the sword of light
And from my fingers flow rivers.
The heart of every man is my nationality;
So rid me of this passport.
The poignant ending to this poem asks us as readers to reexamine our divisions and impositions and look broader at our shared humanity. I gathered a complex tone of strength, anger, heartache, and endurance from Darwish’s perspective, which resonated throughout the rest of the book in accordance with Ashcom’s unique images and text.
Following the poem, a valuable rhythm is established throughout the core of the book, wherein a sheet of semi-translucent paper with CSS web-based code, alternates with a sheet of opaque paper displaying a single-sided, rich image. The top of the first page of code in this sequence reads, “Nablus – Occupied Palestine,” further establishing a specific location and context for Ashcom’s work. According to Ashcom, the code is sourced “from communications between international financial institutions, Wajdi Yaeesh (founder of Human Supporters Association (HSA), a grassroots Palestinian organization based in Nablus), and I as we attempted to sell c-prints from Open to raise funds for HSA. The IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) exploited the bureaucratic fundraising process, preventing Yaeesh from verifying his identity and receiving the donations.”
The code is printed on the front side of each thin sheet, with additional code text mirrored on the back of each sheet, making the specific information on the backside difficult to discern. This design element creates a clear divide between each side of the page, speaking to secrecy and discord, and pointing to languages read from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
The images in Open are stunning, and each lives in its own unique luscious gradient of yellow, orange, red, and purple. Ashcom shares on his website, “I began Open while making photographs of daily life in the city of Nablus in Occupied Palestine in 2009. As I departed back to the United States, Israeli Occupation Forces opened my box of unprocessed film, exposing the images I had made to light. Assuming they were ruined, I left the mostly unexamined film in my studio for over a decade.”
It wasn’t until many years later that Ashcom revisited the seemingly ruined film, finding new potential in them as images, as well as visual metaphors for Palestinian resilience and presence. The images seem to float atop the code, and each photograph offers a wide range of ubiquitous content – landscapes, urbanscapes, portraits, industrial and domestic spaces – with a repeating motif of olive trees throughout the sequence. Some images contain very little photographic information, lending themselves to more abstract interpretations, while in others the content is clear, sharp, and precise. Throughout the rhythm that is created by the paper, text, arrangement, and images, the content is continuously revealed and obscured. The eyes bounce around the page, happily landing on each brilliant image, then scanning the text to discover phrases such as “border” “cellspacing” “identity” “security.”
The analog and digital conversation that Ashcom creates between image and text present in the book challenges us as viewers. He asks us to engage with this narrative, and to look deeply into the images and text to find meaning. The breadth of content clearly speaks to digital and physical intervention and perseverance. I’m captivated by book projects that can manage such a cogent blend between content and design. This book weaves together a layered, captivating narrative through its potent combination of material, text, and image.
Details:
•AUTHOR: Morgan Ashcom
•CALLIGRAPHY BY: Majid Alyousef
•POEM BY: Mahmoud Darwish
• PUBLICATION YEAR: 2022
• ISBN: 978-1-957301-98-3
• 148 pages, 34 plates
•232x182x18mm, 370 grams
• EDITION: 750; First edition, first printing