The Ground book
The Ground
By Tate Shaw
Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2013.
Edition of 500.

12 x 8"; 124 pages with 2 gatefolds. Color. Soft cover.

Preacher Biscuit's Books: "Tate Shaw's The Ground started with photographs made between 2010 and 2012 in a geothermal area of Iceland and at hydrofracking and former coal mining sites in Pennsylvania. The photographs were printed with an inkjet printer on heavy printmaking paper and then water was applied to wash out areas of the ink. The resulting images are interwoven with a personal essay where Tate recounts a period when he lived in a pastoral part of Pennsylvania now inundated by the natural gas industry. This essay book is about personal and historical failures to access the ground – both literally and metaphorically – as a source of energy and grasp its power."

Western New York Book Arts Center: "The Ground is an essay book including photographs made between 2010 and 2012 in a geothermal area of Iceland and at hydrofracking sites in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, as well as writing that documents failures both personal and historical to access the ground as a source of energy and to grasp its power. Images from The Ground are failures in their own right made to show something of the futility of trying to fix an image on a ground in any permanent way.

"The photographs featured in the book were printed with an inkjet printer on a heavy printmaking paper then water was applied to wash out areas of the ink. The results are then digitally scanned to make a new image. Water is a medium to access the core subject, as in the energy mining processes depicted. A geothermal power plant has boreholes drilled deep into the ground that converts steam under enormous pressure into energy. For fracking over ten thousand gallons of chemicals is mixed with over a million gallons of water and a heavy amount of sand is injected underground to release natural gas deposits."
$40