Nicotine began with a task no one would choose: cleaning out a house after a death. TR Ericsson’s mother, Sue, a lifelong smoker, died by suicide in 2003, and it fell to him to strip the nicotine-stained wallpaper from her walls. What he found there — the physical residue of long nights at the dining table, cigarette in hand — became the catalyst for the work gathered in this book. The source images are ordinary family snapshots, the kind that accumulate in any household without anyone deciding they matter. Ericsson reworks them through a halftone silkscreen passed with nicotine, producing ghostly imprints in which the photograph seems to surface rather than fade. The resulting twenty-six color plates, individually tipped onto the pages, vary in tone, and that variance is the point: each print is a distinct physical record, an image coaxed into presence rather than allowed to disappear.
The book’s shape matters as much as its pictures. TBW Books has issued it as a screw post-bound hardcover folio, roughly 25 by 33 centimeters, fifty pages, with a cover in tobacco-colored, suede-like cloth. Tipped-in plates and a catalog-like sequence recall the care of a family scrapbook and, at the same time, the register of a nineteenth-century scientific album — an odd pairing that suits a project poised between mourning and taxonomy. The edition is limited to 500 copies; each is signed, hand-numbered, and burned with a lit cigarette, so that no two objects are identical.
For a collector, the appeal lies less in scarcity than in method. The book is a coherent artwork rather than a portfolio of separate pictures: process, sequence, binding, and the trace of the cigarette all carry the same argument about memory and its residue. Ericsson treats the snapshot not as evidence to be preserved but as material to be transformed, and the result belongs among works that ask what a photograph can still hold when the person in it is gone.
This is a memorial, certainly, but an unsentimental one — a strange and eccentric family album that makes its case through materials and repetition rather than statement. It rewards slow attention.
