Then There Was Us

Where Kim Thue’s debut Dead Traffic (2012) took a more traditional photographic approach through documentary photography, his newly released Lode (2022) presses much more towards the poetic. Losing work due to a paralysed music industry allowed the space for Lode to blossom - a collection of otherwise unseen negatives made both at home in London, as well as from extensive travels across the globe. Like many others, the pandemic imposed the need to re-evaluate but offered Thue the chance to go through these bodies of work, collate and draw a line under them. Though it is something that you could loosely describe as a travelogue, it offers something more: it brings together the often abstracted routes through which we experience the spaces we pass through, and presents them as an in-cohesive act of cohesion.

Photography, especially bookmaking, can be dedicated to the notion of the image ‘belonging’ somewhere. By allowing these images to coexist, in a very personal edit and narrative, this structure of belonging is broken. Instead, it speaks to the scatological way in which we experience the world and those spaces and communities that can be incomprehensible to our reality. Through the 248 pages, an ever-expansive space is created, questioning how we see the world. It is almost reminiscent of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) or Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi (1988), but it instead presents a much darker and grittier form, in Kim Thue’s very direct and inimitable style. Taking slightly more traditional elements of design, but transferring this into a space of fragmented narrative has created a dissonance reflective of many of the communities in which Thue was making images. Throughout, there are fragments of beauty and hope, but they are but glimmers, reflective both of the nature of the world as experienced through making these images, but also the mindset whilst in the editing process during the pandemic. 

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Purchase the book via Skeleton Key Press.