Meghann Riepenhoff’s Littoral Drift + Ecotone gathers two series of camera-less cyanotypes made in direct collaboration with weather and water. Littoral Drift borrows its name from the geologic term for wind-driven waves transporting sand and gravel. For these works, photographic paper is placed at the shoreline, where waves, rain, wind, and sediment etch into the chemistry while the prints expose in sunlight and wash in the surrounding water. Ecotone shifts the collaboration away from the surf. Rain, snow, ice, and fog activate the paper, which exposes under whatever residual light survives even a heavy storm. Riepenhoff drapes the treated sheets over windfall branches, boulders, garbage cans, and fences, so the pieces register water moving through wild and built terrain alike.
These are indexical images in the strictest sense: each is the trace of a particular place and duration rather than a picture of one. Because the cyanotypes are never wholly processed, they continue to change in response to later environments, blurring the line between creation and destruction. Riepenhoff rephotographs moments in that evolution and presents the resulting polyptychs as Continua, so the book holds both fugitive originals and static records of a process that will not settle. The publisher frames the rephotographing as a metaphor for photography’s place in contemporary human experience.
Radius Books, in association with Yossi Milo, issues the work as a hardcover with two volumes in a Z-binding: 224 pages and roughly 100 images, with texts by Charlotte Cotton and Joshua Chuang. Riepenhoff is the photographer throughout; the writers and publisher supply context rather than pictures. The two-volume structure asks the ocean series and the precipitation series to be read side by side as related experiments in letting a landscape author its own image, and it gives the Continua sequences room to unfold alongside the cyanotypes they record.
For collectors drawn to process-driven photography, the book’s claim rests on what it makes visible. The elements do the marking, light and water do the developing, and the result keeps drifting. Its subject is impermanence itself, and the design does not tidy that condition away. What remains is a sustained inquiry into how a photograph might register time and place without a camera, held in a form that can be returned to.
