Matte Editions has teamed up with photographer Michael Marcelle to publish Kokomo, a hardbound photography book that explores the surreal aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
The book is not only a deeply personal exploration of trauma in a small town in the Northeast, but also an intense, hallucinatory journey into the very meaning of family and home in the face of unbelievable destruction. In 2012, the project began to take shape during Michael’s second year in Yale’s MFA program. While making pictures in his hometown in New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy hit, devastating and wreaking havoc on many local towns and communities on the Jersey Shoreline. By imagining the hurricane tore a literal hole in time and space, Michael's images capture the sense of disorientation left in the wake of this unimaginable destruction. Once-familiar places — his home and surrounding neighborhood — were turned into strange, uncanny inversions of themselves. The resulting images became Kokomo. Incorporating many different approaches to picture-making, the photographs draw from the aesthetics of 1980s horror films and homemade special effects to conjure an alternate reality layered atop our own.
For further information and to help support this book getting published go to their Kickstarter
