Ron Jude’s new book, Lick Creek Line, extends and amplifies his 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 lynchpin 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.

Ron Jude was born in Los Angeles in 1965, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and currently lives and works in Upstate New York. His photographs have been exhibited at venues such as Gallery Luisotti (Santa Monica), the Photographers’ Gallery (London), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Proekt_Fabrika (Moscow) and Roth/Horowitz Gallery (New York), among others. His work is in numerous collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta. Jude is the co-founder of A-Jump Books and the author of Alpine Star, Postcards, Other Nature and Emmett. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica.