Global warning

PHOTO FINISH Fogelson eventually settled on one book for all of his shots.

Doug Fogelson had four books in him.

The founder of Chicago’s Front 40 Press was tossing around ideas, trying to figure out if he should put them out individually or if there was even enough material to warrant them. When he stepped back, he began to see a connection emerge: the end of the world.

It’s not the end of the world, exactly, but rather the logical extreme of climate change. For years, Fogelson has photographed natural environments—everything from birch trees in the snow to landscapes of clouds—and urban streets. And now he’s put them together in his new, limited-edition book, The Time After (Front 40, $55).

“I had this desire to bring more awareness to the environmental problems we have, particularly climate change,” says Fogelson, 38. “I thought the smart thing would be to try to combine them, make the book a Front 40 comment on the problem.”

The book opens with panoramic shots of the sun, and the clouds, with vertical stripes interrupting at various points on the pages. When Fogelson photographs his subjects, he doesn’t fully advance his film, creating an overlapping effect that often marks or darkens the sweeping photos. The lens eventually swoops in, down into cities, where urban environments appear cluttered with people, fading in and out of the shots. From there, the reader is taken into the woods, out onto the beach, and then back up into the clouds.

It took a few spins through the book to catch what Fogelson was up to. A disconnect runs throughout The Time After, not just between the clustered populations in the city and the open horizon of the ocean, but in the individual photographs, too, the persistent bifurcating stripes that come from Fogelson’s overlapping. It’s not a literal expression or examination of climate change, but it does hint at the root causes. And there’s also a sense that, as the urban environment gives way to the nature scenes in the second half, the latter possesses a permanence lacking in the former.

Author Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words) echoes these ideas in his essay included in the book. He writes, “In the time after, when industrial civilization is a bitter and too-slowly-fading memory…birds will begin to come back…and murrelets will fly to oceans no longer being murdered and will return with their bellies full of fish to feed their young.”

The Time After follows a series of books for Front 40 tackling a number of potentially political topics. Fogelson founded Front 40 in 2003 as a website, publishing art zines and e-books online. In 2007, he made the leap into full-scale publishing, putting out books like Graffitecture, which contextualized graffiti as a fine art, and Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture, which interrogated the current fetish for the end times.

“Front 40 does coffee-table art books, but we do like to do these activist projects,” says Fogelson. “We didn’t want this to be a ‘How to Be Green’ handbook; we just want to open up the discussion, and maybe on the other end, the reader will come out with their own position.”

Fogelson will appear at Muscle in the Hustle on Saturday 20.

Buy The Time After on Amazon.com

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