The full title of Ed Templeton’s contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series runs long and reads like a sentence pulled from a diary: Memories of the Salt… It sets the register for a volume that follows a five-day family road trip in March 2016, from Pismo Beach to San Francisco by way of Santa Cruz. Templeton photographs in both black-and-white and color. The setting is the California coast, but the subject is closer to proximity: the ordinary intimacy of traveling beside other people and the difficulty of reading them even at close range.
The series format shapes the work. This is a compact hardcover of sixteen pages with sixteen plates in duotone and four-color, and an original signed photograph is placed at the front of each copy. The scale is deliberately modest, and that changes how the book asks to be read: as a small sequence held together by its own rhythm rather than a portfolio to be browsed. Templeton is known for many books and zines and for the artwork of his skateboard company Toy Machine, but here the emphasis falls on sequence and on the object itself. The signed photograph gives the book a different character from a standard monograph, though its role is best understood as a distinctive element of the volume rather than a fixed interpretive key.
His line about these beings and their myriad trips swirling around, whispering stories impossible to understand in the time allotted, is effectively the book’s method in a sentence. It concedes that photographs of strangers and family members cannot fully explain anyone. What they can do is register nearness. Across sixteen pages, the coastal road becomes a place where looking and failing to know are held together without resolution.
Templeton’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and is held in collections including the Orange County Museum of Art, Sammlung Goetz in Munich, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London. For collectors, the appeal lies in that pairing: an artist with a substantial exhibition and institutional record working inside a series format that imposes discipline, and a book whose defining feature is the signed photograph included with each copy.
