Mike Slack: High Tide

First published in 2006 in a limited run of 75 copies, Los Angeles photographer Mike Slack's High Tide has now been issued in this expanded edition. It collects a series of Polaroid close-ups of actors photographed in apparent states of calm or contemplation. "More like meditating than acting," Jeffrey Ladd wrote (of the 2006 limited edition), "each seems to have momentarily dropped their profession and found a personal truth." Slack, a veteran of Polaroid photography (as evidenced by his previous volumes OK, OK, OK, Scorpio and Pyramids), achieves a peculiar tension in these images, between their apparent serenity and their multiple layers of artifice.