Jeffrey Conley’s Reverence approaches the natural world through black-and-white photographs that move between intimate details and expansive views. Light falling across a surface, the shape of a tree, or the meeting of land and water can become the subject of sustained attention. The photographs invite the viewer to consider nature through changing textures, distances and tonal relationships. Their quietness does not make the landscape uniform: each image offers a different arrangement of weight, space and movement.
Conley describes his work outdoors in terms of attentiveness to the present. That approach helps explain the book’s interest in passing conditions rather than fixed descriptions of places. The photographs can be read as encounters with what is available at a particular moment, from delicate patterns to more imposing forms. Looking across the sequence, the reader moves between recognising a scene and noticing how a photograph has organised it. The natural world becomes both a subject and a source of visual structure.
This is the expanded 2024 edition of a monograph first published in 2018. The 80-page hardcover has a nominal format of 10 by 13 inches and presents the photographs in duotone. Peter Fetterman’s introduction includes a passage dated 2024, placing the new edition in relation to the earlier book. The expanded selection provides another opportunity to read this body of work as a sequence, where the scale and placement of one image can affect the experience of the next.
For collectors interested in contemporary landscape photography, the edition offers a concentrated example of Conley’s way of looking. Its value as a reading experience rests in repeated attention rather than a single defining image. Broad spaces and small details ask for different kinds of looking, while the monochrome reproductions give them a shared tonal language. The expanded edition is also materially distinct from the 2018 volume, a useful distinction when considering which version of the project to place on a shelf.
