Asunder.

Photographs by S. Billie Mandel.

TBW Books, Oakland, California, 2025. 80 pp., 54 color plates, 10x13½".

S. Billie Mandle’s Asunder is an immersive and disquieting photographic meditation on attention, contradiction, and the quiet entanglement of beauty and destruction.

Devoid of external text or identifiers, the book arrives almost mute — its title revealed only when a flame is brought near the cover, echoing the slow, flickering reveal within. Three years in the making, Asunder began in the after math of the 2020 Glass Fire in Northern California — one in a series of increasingly catastrophic wildfires reshaping the region’s landscape and psyche. Printed in dark, velvety tones on unbleached, pulpy paper—a tactile reminder of the fragility and material history of trees— the book opens with a glowing orb gradually overtaking the frame across thirteen pages. This visual prologue sets a foreboding, otherworldly tone. A quote from Dante’s Inferno marks the descent: “...the pathway had been lost.” What follows might resemble a walk through the forest, but it unfolds more like a stumble. Mandle’s images don’t lead the viewer through a landscape—they pause, hesitate, and invite waiting. At first glance, the scenes may appear quiet or familiar, but subtle disruptions surface: scorched trunks, brittle branches, the dense residue of loss. The sequence shifts from light to dark, drawing the viewer into a looping, claustrophobic narrative. The forest here is both dead and alive. The trees remain, altered but upright. This coexistence of devastation and persistence is at the heart of Asunder—a paradox where beauty and ruin are not opposites, but facets of the same truth. The result is a patient, unsettling portrait of aftermath—where the act of looking becomes an acknowledgment of what endures.

Cat# ZK786S Softbound $35.00 (978-1-942953-79-1)
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