A glowing orb crosses the page for thirteen frames before anything resembling a forest appears. That overture sets the terms of S. Billie Mandle’s Asunder, published by TBW Books in 2025: light arrives first, and what it discloses is not reassurance but a slow, flickering unease. The book grew out of the aftermath of the 2020 Glass Fire in Northern California, one in a series of fires that have remade the region’s terrain and its inhabitants’ sense of place. Mandle spent three years on the project, and the photographs carry that duration. They do not survey a burn scar from a safe distance. Scorched trunks, brittle branches, and the residue of loss surface gradually, and the sequence moves from light into darkness, tightening as it goes.
Mandle withholds the conventions that usually steady a landscape photograph. There are no captions, no place names, no orienting text; the book opens almost silently, and its Dante quotation—”the pathway had been lost”—functions less as a key than as a marker of descent. Her images pause and hesitate rather than guide. What can look at first like an ordinary stand of trees turns out to hold disruptions: a ruined trunk that still stands, a branch that should not bend that way. The forest is at once dead and alive, and the pictures refuse to resolve that contradiction into either elegy or consolation.
TBW Books has given the work a physical form that argues with its subject. The eighty pages are saddle stitched and printed in dark, velvety tones on unbleached, pulpy stock, so the paper itself recalls the material history and fragility of trees. Fifty-four color plates run at roughly 10 by 13.25 inches, a scale that keeps the viewer close to the grain of things without turning the landscape into spectacle. The design is austere by intention; every decision seems made to keep attention on the slow reveal rather than on the object.
For collectors, the interest lies in how completely the book binds its argument to its sequencing and materials. Asunder is not a document of a disaster, nor a redemptive account of regrowth. It is a patient, unsettling portrait of aftermath in which looking becomes a form of acknowledgment. Mandle treats beauty and ruin as facets of one condition, and the book’s cumulative weight—the orb, the descent, the darkening pages—is legible only when the sequence is experienced whole.
