Faces In The Rocks

Joel Simpson's new book, Faces in the Rocks: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography, presents a generous collection of images that combine the natural world with the mental one, without sacrificing realistic capture. In fact, it is the mineral realism that makes these images so surreal.

Beginning with an exploration of unusual landscapes, including cavescapes, frozen waterfalls, ominous atmospheres, and metaphorical scenes from nature, Simpson prepares the viewer for the deeper explorations that follow. But first he offers a series of aerial images taken from drones, and small and large airplanes. These images of the earth from above reveal landscapes from an aerial perspective (mostly without horizon or sky), which become abstractions (and one figuration) .

The rest of the book features compositions found at close range from around the world, where the subject is less about a particular place (the province of landscapes) than it is about the impact of a powerful abstraction or bizarre figuration.

These chapters on Abstraction and Figuration (at ground level) show that when the photo artist gives access to his unconscious to a plethora of mineral and glacial forms, he can capture utterly original images beyond the limits of his own imagination. Such images tend to be more outlandish, more frightening, more seductive, and more detailed than the vast majority of painted or drawn images, since they result from the collaboration between the unconscious and the apparent "chaos" of rock and ice formations from the natural world. These images bear a strong surrealistic charge, due both to the chaos of their surface textures and to their phantasmagorical content. They reveal the marvelous in nature as well as the strong relationship between the unconscious inner world of dreams and the outer world of the mineral surface of the earth.

The book takes viewer/readers even "farther beyond" landscapes in the following section. Here he turns fisheye-lens captures of the ceilings and walls of caves, grottoes, and a dried mud pond into imaginary heavenly bodies and dystopian future scenes. All images are real mineral surfaces: unique captures, no image-combining and no AI. They are segments of the real world recontextualized by the distorting optics of the 8-mm fisheye lens and a starry-sky background.

The book concludes with a chapter showing how to capture and create such photographs, as well as an appendix that shows scenes and maps of six of the places he visited in order to find the formations.

"Joel Simpson demonstrates that we shape and are shaped by land outside and inside. Ranging from abstraction to surrealism, through associative explorations that render the unconscious conscious, he invites us on fantastic journeys, offering us stimulating perspectives and tools designed to enrich our relationships with land/ourselves."

-JOHN PAUL CAPONIGRO

"Simpson's breathtaking images-manifesting 'psycho-geological photography'-stand as a testament to the profound imprint the earth leaves on the human mind and the power of photography to reveal such truths. It is the rocks that man has found universal forms and faces. In fact, the human psyche itself mirrors the layers and crust-from the conscious surface to its enigmatic core. To witness these photographic revelations is nothing short of groundbreaking."

-ROGER BALLEN

"[Simpson's images]...are nothing if not irresistible visual love letters to our weary planet's enduring mysteries and its charms."

-EDWARD M. GOMEZ, editor, brutjournal.com

"Playgrounds for the Mind reveals Joel Simpson as part genius, part crazy man with his intense passion for what he calls geological art photography in near and far world locations. The images are gorgeous, strangely compelling beauties rooted in Surrealism. They beckon me to their sites which I know I could never find; Simpson has saved me the trouble and makes them even more beautiful than they probably are."

-HARVEY STEIN, educator, author, photographer

"Nature, at its most non-human magnificence, is not malevolent, it is indifferent. In Joel Simpson's view it is also a place where the human can interact with the great inhuman forces by offering imagination a playground....Simpson travels all over the earth to find the most extraordinary and bizarre geological sites, then to photograph their most complex rocks. With help from Carl Jung, André Breton, or your own dreams, you can find-at some unconscious or conscious depth-familiar déjà-vus from the history of art or the nightmares of your tribe."

-ANDREI CODRESCU, novelist, poet, essayist

"Simpson claims a Surrealist pedigree to his current work that may reveal mysterious figures in rock formations, but whether they're there or not, the work is striking."

-LYLE REXER, critic, and author

"Playgrounds for the Mind is a terrific mind-opening (and eye-opening) work. Congratulations. [Simpson has] invented a whole new way of seeing."

- RUSSELL BANKS (1940-2023), novelist

"Always a courageous visionary."

- CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, (1939-2019), avant-garde, multi-media, feminist artist (from an email before the book came out)

New Jersey native JOEL SIMPSON has been photographing since he was a teenager in the 1960s, turning pro in 2002. Since 2002 there have been over 50 shows and publications of his art in the US and abroad, including Paris, Barcelona, and Rome. His work has been published in the US, Belgium, France and India, and he has received numerous awards. His 2019 mostly color landscape book focusing on remarkable geology, Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of Our Planet, received enthusiastic reviews plus the prestigious 2019 Nautilus Gold Award for Art and Photography.His new book, Faces in the Rock: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography, systematizes his discoveries in the aesthetics of abstractions and figurations in natural formations, and concludes with a tongue-in-cheek collection of imaginary extra-terrestrial landscapes and dystopian future cityscapes.Simpson lives in Union, New Jersey.

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