The Life of Small Things

Adam Ekberg

November 2015
Images by Adam Ekberg
Essay by Darius Himes
Interview with Dave Snyder

11 x 9 inches
Clothbound with slipcase
96 pages
45 color plates

ISBN 978-1-939932-04-4

About The Life of Small Things

In his photographic interventions, Adam Ekberg presents moments both mysterious and delightful. His constructions, rendered in lavish color, are not easily decoded or resolved. A disco ball turning in the woods is simultaneously fantastic and lonely; as the beam of a flashlight bounces between mirrors in a small hallway, the scene radiates a warming light that will only ever live within the confines of the photographic frame.

Brought together for the artist’s first monograph, the images in The Life of Small Things confound expectations about what we perceive as the inevitability of the commonplace. Made over the course of the past decade, the series began as a response to Ekberg’s time as a hospice aide. Since then, his interventions have embraced a wide range of quiet surprises. Ekberg hints at the poignant beauty that can take shape, although fleetingly, when the spark of possibility hits the mundane.

About Adam Ekberg

Ekberg’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, IN. He is represented by ClampArt, NYC; De Soto Gallery, Venice, CA; and Platform Gallery, Seattle, WA.

About Darius Himes

Darius Himes is International Head of Photographs at Christie’s. Himes was formerly the director of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Prior to that, he was a co-founder of Radius Books, a non-profit publisher of books on art and photography, and a founding editor of photo-eye Booklist, a quarterly magazine devoted to photography books. A widely respected lecturer and writer on photography and photobooks, his most recent title, Publish Your Photography Book, was co-authored and published in 2011.