Lick Creek Line 1997-2011

Read The Poetry of Elsewhere by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa on The Great Leap Sideways.

Lick Creek Line extends and amplifies Ron Jude's ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique.

With an undercurrent of mystery and melancholy that echoes Jude’s previous two books about his childhood home of Central Idaho, Lick Creek Line serves as the linchpin in a multi-faceted, three-part look at the incomprehensibility of self and place through photographic narrative. While Alpine Star functioned as a fictitious sociological archive, and Emmett explored the muddy waters of memory and autobiography, Lick Creek Line finds its tenor through the sleight-of-hand structure of a traditional photo essay.