The Endless Sphere of Time
Geir and Kate Jordahl
North Street Book Prize 2025 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Art Book
Critiqu
e by Jendi Reiter
The Endless Sphere of Time, edited by Kate Jordahl, is an art book with remarkable production values and international scope. This luxuriously bound book pairs Geir Jordahl's circular black-and-white images of liminal spaces in nature and architecture with short works by Norwegian modernist poet Rolf Jacobsen, in their original language alongside English translations by Roger Greenwald.
Everything about the book design is well-conceived and elegant. Housed in a black box sleeve with the title in circular silver lettering that changes visibility with the angle of light, the hardcover is bound in the same black cloth with gold lettering around a red circle. The back is simply a grey-and-white, planet-like circle on a black ground. Enigmatic and alluring, this minimalist presentation sets the stage for the photographs collected within, solitary circles centered on a white page with no explanatory text, leaving the reader to ponder the connections among them. (A list of place names for each photo is included at the end of the book.)
This absence of storyline is sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness, as the collection is nearly 200 pages and starts to feel repetitive or random if read from beginning to end. The photos are unified by their aesthetic, but I would have liked to see more moments where the juxtaposed images spoke directly to each other by echoing their shapes or materials.
For instance, in the spread on pgs. 42-43, a rough lean-to woven of sticks against a birch tree in Sierra, CA is paired with the entrance to a manicured Italian garden flanked by classical statues. Both are portals, human-made structures, alike in one way but opposed in another. In another effective spread on pgs. 178-79, a roadside sign reading "NOW IS THE DAY OF SALVATION" in crude block capitals faces a replica of Stonehenge in Maryhill, WA, the pagan and the Christian religious artifacts making competing demands on our loyalty.
From Norwegian fjords to prehistoric fossils in Oregon rock, the photos hone in on textures and angles of light that express yearning, the passage of time, and gateways to mystery. These themes are picked up in Jacobsen's poems, as in "Written on the Wind" (pg.56):
The rain pelts the windows,
the wind lifts it and wipes it away,
the butterfly spreads out its red sail.
We can't remember where we are
—it's on the tip of our tongue
which is suddenly numb and everything
seems like it's behind a veil.
The page numbers were too small and faint, making it difficult to match the images to the place names in the index. Other than that, the physical book was attractive and professional enough to be sold in a museum gift shop. We commend the team behind this book for their careful execution of an ambitious vision.
Read an excerpt from The Endless Sphere of Time (PDF)
Buy this book from the authors' website.
