Low Tide, 2021–2025

Ron Jude’s new photographs dovetail with the images and central themes found in his previous body of work entitled 12 Hz, in which he was preoccupied with the basic materials and mechanics of our planet. In these newest images, rocks and water begin to yield to organic life in the form of fungi, sea anemone, and a maritime forest, expanding on the Forest Floor epilogue component of his12 Hz monograph from 2020. The title, Low Tide, references the literal subject matter of many of the images, while alluding figuratively to the ebb and flow of anxiety in our increasingly strained environmental and political moment. As the ocean surface recedes, a fleeting glimpse of deep structure is offered, as terrestrial forces and the alien world of sea life are compressed into stark black and white images. These temporary landscapes aren’t created by the tide so much as exposed by its absence.

Jude’s photographs inhabit a temporal scale that dwarfs human experience, revealing what is usually beyond our sensory grasp. The tide’s retreat mirrors his deliberate withdrawal of anthropocentric cues: there are no people, no architecture, no overt narrative—only the slow, relentless processes of the earth. Furthering the visual vocabulary found in his previous landscape work, Jude adopts an attitude that rejects rational thought in favor of the subconscious, owing a debt to Frederick Sommer’s Surrealist-inspired landscape photographs of the 1940s and 50s, which were often devoid of markers of scale or distance. Jude’s Low Tide images can be tense and foreboding in mood, with a nod to the ontological themes that run throughout much of his work.