Book of Hours
Lily Freemond
In Book of Hours, Lily Freemond turns her attention toward the spaces where wilderness and urban life quietly converge. Observing deer at the LaBagh Woods Forest Preserve on the outskirts of Chicago, the images emerge from an act of sustained looking over the course of twelve months. Photographed on an iPhone through the lens of a pair of binoculars, each picture records a fleeting interplay between distance and proximity. The circular frame imposed by the binoculars recalls both an optical lens and the barrel of a rifle. Freemond photographs within this uneasy overlap. Where Sontag suggests the camera as an instrument that aims, isolates, and symbolically claims its subject, held at a distance, the animals in these images, remain irreducibly their own, continually slipping beyond the photographer's reach. In these images the deer appear as fellow inhabitants of a rapidly transforming landscape. As the boundaries between city and forest become increasingly porous, animals occupy a new terrain. Book of Hours becomes a quiet witness to this Anthropocene, resisting spectacle or easy narratives of catastrophe. Ecologically, the deer themselves are not passive witnesses; their overpopulation has become a transformative force within LaBagh, reshaping the forest through overbrowsing even as they adapt to its changing conditions.
Across the pages of the book, shifts in weather, light, and season mirror an interior passage of time. The deer move through snow, brush, shadow, and clearing, roaming freely across the pages while remaining anchored by Freemond's lens, inviting viewers into a contemplative space. Drawn from these shifts; the title references the medieval Book of Hours; devotional manuscripts organized around the canonical hours of the day and the changing seasons which structured moments of reflection through repeated acts of attention. Like its namesake, Freemond's Book of Hours transforms recurring observation into a quiet ritual, allowing the repeated act of witnessing to become a form of contemplation. Freemond's photographs invite us to consider what it means to encounter another being without possession or to linger in a moment of mutual presence and recognize the fragility of a shared space.
"Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time." – Susan Sontag
Zine available in a signed edition of 50.
24 page saddle stitch zine. Riso printed on Milkweed French text weight paper.
5” x 5”
Editioned and initialled by the artist.
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