Kim Thue: Lode (signed)

During the 2020 pandemic-imposed lockdown and subsequent loss of his job bordering a paralysed music industry, Kim Thue grabbed the rarely presented opportunity away from everyday distractions to re-engage with his otherwise neglected photography. Drawers full of previously unseen negatives and contact sheets generated from extensive travels from his home in London to far flung corners of China, Iceland, Spain and Sierra Leone had become an unresolved issue sitting in stalemate at the back of his mind for years. Feeling the need to confront and draw a line under the existing work to move forward, Thue took a deep dive from an unregimented platform, undergoing an editing process that was intuitive, personal and experimental in nature. The result of his efforts is the gritty, multi-layered collection of works now defined as the photographer’s astounding second monograph, Lode. 

In some respects, Lode can be regarded as a logical follow-up to Thue’s acclaimed and long out-of-print debut Dead Traffic (2012) while still being a project isolated in its own right. It is a continuation of his uncompromising photographic style, yet Lode takes further steps away from documentary traditions towards a broader, more poetic and open-ended experience. At its core, it is a book devoid of classic narrative conventions that confidently speaks to viewers while consciously allowing room for resonance and interpretation. In the words of Edward Dimsdale, whose perceptive essay closes the book, the experience of Lode “is as much registered in the guts as it is processed through the visual cortex.” What emerges from its 248 pages is not an “easily assimilated travelogue. Rather, it is an introspective, complex meditation on inequality, configured by broken links and restlessness, which, once carefully digested, reveals traces of doubt within the journeying photographer himself.”