Faces in the Rocks

FACES IN THE ROCKS: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography pushes photography past the conventions of landscape into a realm where geology, perception, and the unconscious intersect. Rather than depicting place, the book treats rock and ice formations as sites of encounter, where chance, texture, and psychic recognition give rise to images that feel at once discovered and unprecedented.
Endorsed by former New York Times photography critic A. D. Coleman, the book opens with an Introduction that situates this work within Surrealist and abstract traditions while defining its departure from conventional landscape practice. It then unfolds through a carefully structured progression: metaphorical and ice-bound landscapes; aerial views in which the absence of the horizon transforms terrain into abstraction; and close-up studies that shift attention from place to composition. A theoretical discussion of the unstable boundary between abstraction and figuration leads to the book's central section, Figuration's, where faces and other forms emerge from rock itself.
The photographs in FACES IN THE ROCKS arise from the apparent randomness and visual chaos of natural formations, particularly in deserts, rocky coastlines, and frozen waterfalls. Through tightly framed capture and deliberate digital editing, these formations are transformed into clear aesthetic statements. The images are not inventions in the traditional sense, but the products of an involuntary collaboration between geological time and psychic depth. Landscape becomes not a subject but a medium for imaginative recognition.
The book concludes with a second body of work that ventures into speculative territory. Using a circular fish-eye lens, the author transforms caves, grottoes, and dried mud surfaces into imaginary asteroids, extraterrestrial terrains, and dystopian future cityscapes, faithfully captured yet optically re imagined.
With 212 photographs drawn from 76 locations, a practical guide to psycho-geological technique, and appendices documenting original sites, FACES IN THE ROCKS restores imagination to the experience of nature. Without displacing scientific or documentary perspectives, it deepens perception, rekindles wonder, and invites viewers to see the Earth anew.