J.A. Young
Book Review
Artist: J.A. Young
Photobook: Of Fire, Far Shining
Publisher: ZONE
Specs: Softcover, 21,5 x 27 cm, 174 pages
Price: €35
J.A. Young’s first monograph Of Fire, Far Shining (published by ZONE) functions less as a photobook and more like an artifact of something already lost—something fractured, washed up, distorted in its attempt to make contact with the present. It digs out time, but not in the way historians claim to arrange the past into digestible meaning. Instead, Young plunges into the void of history as an ongoing, inescapable force, where images become ruins, oracles, weapons.
The experience of moving through Of Fire, Far Shining is one of profound unease. It evokes something like Kundera’s sentiment: “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” But Young’s work suggests the past is resistant to that rewriting—it festers, seethes, leaks into the now in ways we don’t fully understand.
“(…) Young plunges into the void of history as an ongoing, inescapable force, where images become ruins, oracles, weapons.“
The images—rephotographed, manipulated, deconstructed—seem to oscillate between clarity and dissolution, as though time itself is glitching. There’s something unsettling in their monochrome haze, a refusal to conform to the expected order of things. It’s the past misbehaving, slipping out of our control, reminding us that it was never stable to begin with. “I began to come to grips with the scope of certain devastating realities of life on Earth: the staggering impact of corporate and consumer greed on the environment, the grisly violence perpetuated by the U.S. National Security State and its Military Industrial Complex, and the insidious reach of the repugnant ideologies that sustain these sinister forces,” as they reflect on the creative process.
The book lingers on transformation, but not the hopeful kind. Rather, it contemplates the rampant militarization, technological hyper-violence, and unrelenting ecological devastation. There are wires, knives, distorted faces, a sense of people in motion—doing something, always doing something. The human impulse to act, to build, to alter. But to what end? Progress and destruction feel inseparable here, two sides of the same pursuit. Heroism, vanity, power. Whatever drives us forward seems to also be the thing that keeps tearing us apart. There is no clear distinction between creation and ruin, only a cycle that endlessly repeats.
“(…) There’s something unsettling in their monochrome haze, a refusal to conform to the expected order of things. It’s the past misbehaving, slipping out of our control, reminding us that it was never stable to begin with.“
Young doesn’t impose a linear narrative, yet a strange coherence emerges through curation. The cropping and sequencing of pre-existing images forge an atmosphere thick with ambiguity. The washed-out quality of the prints feels simultaneously archival and prophetic. It’s as if these images don’t belong to a fixed era, but exist in a liminal space between past, present, and some post-human future. And maybe that’s the most unsettling thing about Of Fire, Far Shining: the way it makes us feel like we’re trapped in an epoch that refuses to resolve itself, a perpetual limbo where catastrophe is always just about to happen.
Instead of offering explanation or solace, the book leaves us with the sense that something lurks just outside the frame, watching. Waiting. History, after all, doesn’t end—it just finds new ways to haunt us.
Of Fire, Far Shining is available for purchase via ZONE here.
J.A. Young
is a photographer and multimedia artist based in Asheville, North Carolina. Drawing on a wide range of influences, from cultural anthropology and world mysticism to paranormal phenomena and the occult. Young’s work combines various materials and methods, including archival adaptations, personal photographs, print experimentation, divination, and collage, to transform subtle feelings into tangible visual expressions. Rather than adhering to strict themes or concepts, each print serves as part of an ever-evolving landscape, mirroring the shifting contours of perception and an emotional relationship to the world.
ZONE
is an independent book publisher and photography based visual arts platform run by its founder, Ali. Started in the summer of 2018 as a personal research project, the aim of ZONE is to cultivate a variety of dialogues between artists and their audience, as well as supporting them with printed and online publications.
Text by Linda Zhengová
Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX
She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, gender and sexuality.