THE LOBSTER’S TALE
Chris Price
Bruce Foster
Published by Massey University Press, 2021
The Lobster’s Tale navigates the perils of a life driven by overreaching ambition and the appetite for knowledge, conquest and commerce. In conversation with the text, Bruce Foster’s photographs navigate a parallel course of shadows and light, in which the extraordinary textures and colours of the natural world tell a darker story.
Reviewed by IAN WEDDE
Aotearoa NZ Review of Books
FULL REVIEW
…Chris Price’s substantial prose body text is in conversation with the running bottom-of-page text ribbon, and with Foster’s tonally complex images that comment in diverse ways on the instability or vulnerability of the ‘natural world’.
Reviewed by Michael Steven
PhotoForum online
FULL REVIEW
Foster’s images are like stills uplifted from the mind of a dreamer. They are visual koans, where enlightenment or nirvana occurs in the duration of an unmediated and unmeasurable instant, and always eluding those pesky censors: reason and logic. I’m reminded of the psychic juxtapositions and absurd symbol arrangements found in the paintings of Rene Magritte. To look at any of these pictures, is to again be reminded of how all forms must ultimately give way or return to the state of formlessness.
Reviewed by Chris Reed
NZ Booklovers
FULL REVIEW
At the same time as Price is presenting this rich analogy through words and phrasing, Bruce Foster’s contribution to The Lobster’s Tale cannot go unnoticed. As a photographer known for his lamentations on the destruction of natural and pristine landscapes through interactions with people and corporations, Foster continues to triumph with the imagery presented here. It is hard not to be moved by the images, confronted by some, and deeply affected by others.
