©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green (cover), (TBW Books, 2025)

Perhaps one of the more difficult questions a photographer faces when making a book is an editorial one: what image should follow another, how one photograph leads into the next, and what kind of sense this sequencing produces. It is often a question of flow and interruption, of how meaning accrues or is frustrated through a sequence, often settled less by logic than through intuition. Beneath this practical concern, however, lies a deeper issue, one that keeps returning regardless of how many decisions you make: what to do with all the photographs that don’t make the cut? The cast-offs that accumulate on desktops and memory cards, on contact sheets and unprocessed film — images that still hum with a faint, stubborn life. There are some photographs might never find a place in a story, yet continue to insist, stubbornly and adamantly, on their own small truth: “I saw this. This matters.”

Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

For photographers, keeping these images is a kind of wager: a belief in photography’s potentiality, bound up with a strange and slightly uncomfortable temporal condition. The faith, if that’s the right word, is that photographs do not simply belong to the moment in which they are made but continue forward through time, waiting, sometimes for years, for a future they cannot yet know nor name. Curran Hatleberg’s Blood Green exists because of that belief.

Hatleberg assembled the book from the outtakes of River’s Dream (TBW, 2023), shaping it as a kind of coda to the earlier work, though it stands alone, a creature unto itself. Both projects were made within the same ten-year window, from 2010 to 2020, and in the same locations across the American Southeast. During the editing of River’s Dream, Hatleberg recognized a peculiar subset of photographs that did not quite fit. The tonal register was off. Their emotional weather was wrong. The story they told was another story entirely. And so they were set aside, consigned to the cutting-room floor, that mythic place where the future sometimes resides. Blood Green gathers those images and follows their lead: an alternate route, the road not taken, a different path, a parallel story told from whatever had been left behind.

The pictures in Blood Green are of the swamp. They are of the water. They are of figures submerged, wading and floating, caught in the orbit of summer humidity of idle phenomena, of lives lived close to a swimming hole, and a fishing spot.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

There are great American photographers of the street. The names are familiar: Robert Frank, Vivian Maier, Jeff Mermelstein. But what are we to say of the swamp? Where is the photographer who pictures the damp forest glade, the delta at dusk, mudflats and narrow backwater paths, the cypress knee, the river baptism, a pauper’s funeral, or the red clay road? Curran Hatleberg may be that photographer.

Blood Green opens with a man holding a snake in a circle, followed by an image of a small pool of water, and then another image of a man (I first thought it was the photographer himself) smoking a cigarette while partially submerged. The final image returns us to the snake: two men in the bed of a pickup truck examining a length of snakeskin as if divining a future from it, reading it like the palm of a hand.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

When I asked Hatleberg whether the man smoking was himself, he explained that the photograph shows someone who is like a brother to him, while the floating figure in River’s Dream is his actual brother. Taken together, the two images are like a familial secret forged in water, binding the two books together.

Perhaps the interpretive key to these images resides in the cover of both books, it is an image made through marbling: pigment moving through the design, sliding, caroming, colliding, and then settling into place like a miniature weather system. Marbling carries that sense of liquidity, of materials in flux, even after they’ve dried. And because marbled paper so often appears inside book covers, it also carries an older association with a threshold condition: the passage from the everyday into another world, a different consciousness, something which Hatleberg’s work delivers with an electric charge. At the same time, the photographs themselves remain grounded in what Paul Graham calls “the world-as-it-is.” The work holds both forces at once: the factual density of daily life, and something more otherworldly swirling through and within the images

Hatleberg first encountered marbling in an old book when he was a child. He cannot remember which book exactly, only the shock and beauty of seeing it on the endpapers and edges of the pages. It made a lasting impression, one that was so strong he always imagined it as the perfect cover. The marbling used for River’s Dream mirrored the kaleidoscopic logic of the book’s sequence, its palette drawn from the photographs themselves, its reds, yellows, blues flowing like an aria. In Blood Green, the color turns earthbound, to the natural world: the surface of stagnant water, tunnel of foliage, moss, duckweed and bloody alligator skin.

Using marbling for Blood Green felt inevitable, since the books are companions, twins. They share dimensions, paper stock, and were printed by the same offset printer. They share faces too: people who pass from one book to the other, recurring figures in a long, rambling sentence that never quite ends, looping back on itself, as if told by a storyteller intent on keeping the tale going, allowing characters to enter without introduction and leave without explanation, appearing for a moment, then suddenly vanishing.

The feeling of reverie is one way to approach this, but what I keep returning to is cadence, the sense that certain books, like certain bodies of photographs, construct a feeling through how they move, not only through what they wordlessly communicate. It’s perhaps for these reasons that Hatleberg feels like a photographer of reverie, a photographer of “lost time.” It is this image of lost time that runs through these images: people hanging out, talking, sleeping, letting the day pass in that unhurried way that becomes its own kind of atmosphere. That sense of reverie is present not only here but across his two other books.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

There is that remarkable image of swimmers in a stone quarry. The quarry feels like a place where people gather to commune with nature and each other, to swim, to feel something other than themselves. The photograph is a kind of pocket of the world carved out of rock and light. The scene also feels distinctly American, carrying that loose sense of freedom, a devil-may-care attitude, inevitably calling up other images of swimming and leisure such as Thomas Eakins’s Swimming (or The Swimming Hole), with its own complicated history, including the strange, almost ominous detail that it hung above Jacqueline Kennedy’s bed the night before JFK was shot in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

When asked why he’s drawn to these kinds of moments and scenes, Hatleberg has explained that it has something to do with how he works: he photographs almost exclusively in summer, that narrow band of the year when people spill outdoors, when the heat coaxes bodies into public view and leisure becomes visible on the street as an ambient theatre of hanging out, strolling, waiting, smoking, drinking, talking, or doing nothing at all. He relies on people as collaborators, subjects and guides, and in the summer, the possibilities seem to multiply at an almost exponential rate.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

He has remarked that summer is the season when people go outside to walk, without plan or purpose, drifting through their days as though time itself had unbuttoned a little. Shirts come off, skin is bare, humidity presses down, and weeds muscle through concrete, the whole world in a slow thaw, the landscape sweating and expanding. He’s spoken of being drawn to images of reverie and loafing, and it’s this feeling of lost time pooling in the humid air that ultimately shapes the mood of his pictures and the worlds they open up.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

His words are better than mine on the value of summer in his work:

“Summer is a smell: it is the stink of the river in your nose. It is the overflowing cup. It is the snake in the grass you didn’t see until you stepped on its back. Summer is all the hidden sounds rising in the night: cicadas screaming and the bottle rocket’s report. Summer is gathering in the dark damp shadows of the front porch and watching the afternoon thunderheads roll in out of nowhere to bury the world in water. Most of all summer is faces — an endless parade of faces coming and going, laughing, touching, crashing into each other. Faces engaged in careless violence and sloppy embrace. Faces excited to share something of their life with someone else. All of them slick with sweat, all of them perfect and irresistible. During the wide open days and extended evenings of the summer season, people naturally flow together and the world shimmers and warps in the sweltering air like a dream.”

When I started thinking about Blood Green, I kept returning to Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree. The connection felt immediate, with the long unspooling sentences, the granular attention to detail, the stark beauty and the sudden violence. Hatleberg knows this too, Suttree is his handle on Instagram, a signal for those who recognize it. McCarthy’s novel takes place along riverbanks and houseboats along the Tennessee River, among fishermen and drifters, within economies cobbled together from the day’s catch and whatever luck or misfortune the water delivers. In a world at once beautiful and inhospitable, Hatleberg’s photobook is populated by men who live by getting by: work shaped by fishing, by tides and accidents, photographs that describe daily life as the underside of the pastoral: the joke told on the back porch, jars of moonshine passed hand to hand, a cigarette smoked at a secret swimming hole, clothes drying on a line, boats pulled up in the mud, the low, humid breath of the swamp pressing in on everything.

©Curran Hatleberg, Blood Green, (TBW Books, 2025)

Curran Hatleberg is a photographer based in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum, MASS MoCA, the International Center of Photography and Higher Pictures. In 2019, Hatleberg was featured in the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works are held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art, among others. Hatleberg is the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Maryland State Arts Council Grant, a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant, and a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship grant. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016, and his second monograph, River’s Dream, was published by TBW Books in 2022.

Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art. He is currently the 2025–2026 PERICULUM Foundation for Contemporary Art Discourse Fellow. His book “Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles” was recently published by MIT Press (2025). Andrew’s writing has appeared in Camera Austria, History of Photography, Momus, Oxford Art Journal and Philosophy of Photography.

“Blood Green” | Curran Hatleberg (TBW Books, 2025)

ORDER: https://tbwbooks.com/products/blood-green

Hardbound with edge color 64 pages, 35 plates 11.5 x 13.5 in. / 292 x 343 mm

ISBN 978-1-942953-76-0