Mimi Plumb’s Landfall gathers photographs made during the 1980s into a disquieting account of a world that appears materially damaged and psychologically off balance. The remnants of a house fire, scarred alpine terrain, discarded matter, and military weaponry recur alongside friends and strangers whose gestures resist easy interpretation. Rather than identify a single event or location as its subject, Plumb observes how unease settles into landscapes, objects, and bodies.

The photographs move between evidence and intimation. Human-made damage is plainly visible, yet the portraits and group scenes remain more ambiguous: figures embrace, pose, or handle weapons with a casualness that makes the images more disturbing, not less. Plumb’s recollection of childhood fear during the Cuban Missile Crisis supplies an important emotional undertow. The book’s anxiety is therefore both public and intimate, joining the threat of large-scale destruction to private habits of vigilance and apprehension.

Landfall derives much of its force from sequencing. Images of refuse and environmental injury are interwoven with portraits, allowing formal echoes and shifts in mood to carry the narrative rather than explanatory text. Across 53 duotone plates, beauty and foreboding are held in deliberate tension. The photographs neither resolve their historical moment nor reduce it to an emblem; instead, they show instability as an atmosphere that permeates ordinary encounters.

Published by TBW Books in 2018, the 120-page hardcover measures approximately 29.8 by 24.1 centimetres. Its three-colour foil-stamped front and tipped-on image on the reverse give the object a restrained graphic presence suited to the work’s indirect method. For collectors, its importance lies not in claims of scarcity but in the clarity with which an archive of 1980s photographs has been shaped into a sustained book narrative—one whose Cold War apprehensions remain legible in later periods of social and environmental uncertainty.