Alone in a small sea kayak, photographer Eirik Johnson floats along Washington State’s Duwamish River beneath the massive hulls of transoceanic barges, making photographs from these surreal spaces. His photographs capture the patinated exteriors of these beastly structures and transform scale, perspective, and light. Each layer of sediment, diesel, tar, and marine life that collects on the hulls is a marker of their voyages and of the broader system of oceanic trade. Leviathan Rising also contains a series of unique daguerreotype photograms, created in collaboration with Daniel Carrillo, depicting glass floats used by early-twentieth-century Japanese fishermen to suspend their nets in the Pacific Ocean. If the floats broke free from their netting, the ocean’s currents conveyed the spheres east, ultimately reaching the shores of the Pacific Northwest. The reflective surface of these silver plates contains the frozen imprint of each float’s journey across the Pacific.
This limited edition contains one signed copy of the book, one signed and numbered photogravure hand printed by the artist of the work Float No. 7, and one ten-inch vinyl record of Johnson’s original sound compositions Leviathan Rising, composed of aquatic field recordings that he made beneath the surface of river, and Ebb Free, which is inspired by the river’s slow tidal drift as it empties back out to the sea.
