Eirik Johnson made Borderlands from overlooked terrain where public land gives way to private, and where the framework of urban order begins to break down. Published by Twin Palms Publishers in October 2005, Borderlands gathers 31 four-color plates across 80 pages. In the statement accompanying the book, Johnson writes that he searches the boundaries between public and private land, and that these are non-spaces where temporary relationships occur as forces of nature meet the physical presence of the urban environment.

The incidents Johnson describes are ordinary and momentary: flooding, brush fires, tidal change. His stated subject is not wilderness but the fraying edges of the contemporary environment, where nature’s operations and built order come into contact. The publisher’s format of 8 by 12 inches suits these scenes, and the color plates give the terrain room to register. What holds the sequence together is a recurring situation rather than a single site: the quiet meeting of natural process and human construction.

The boundaries Johnson describes can be understood as places where different kinds of order overlap. A property line divides land, but water, vegetation and weather do not necessarily follow the same division. His attention to these temporary relationships asks the reader to consider a landscape as something in process. What appears marginal to an organized city can become the center of a photograph.

The hardcover offers a sustained encounter with such overlooked places. A reader can attend to the colors and surfaces of a particular scene, then consider the wider relationship it suggests between human arrangements and natural processes. Johnson’s statement supplies a point of departure without turning every image into an illustration of a rule. The book leaves room for the strangeness of an individual encounter as well as the recurring concerns that connect the photographs.