In Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road, his second book with The Ice Plant, Brooklyn-based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968) revisits the Central Illinois topography of his first monograph, Local Objects, with a sequence of 56 black-and-white, medium-format photographs, all made on a single winter morning. Where Local Objects meandered this semi-rural Midwestern landscape through changing seasons, detached from time, here Carpenter follows a straightforward path, literally taking the viewer on a chronological two-hour walk from point A to point B. Nothing much happens along this brief narrative arc--there are fallow fields, standing water, dormant trees, the occasional tire track on worn pavement--yet Carpenter explores the stillness of this outdoor space with an intensity of attention, a lightness of touch and a palpable, almost erotic longing, discovering complex subtleties at every turn.
