Echo Mask

by Jonathan Levitt

“Jonathan Levitt's Echo Mask has the ineffable quality of a dissolving dream” - Brad Zellar 

"Echo Mask feels like a haunted memory of a future that we have yet to engage with"  - Todd Hido

“Mysterious and hypnotic” - Igor Posner 

"In the form of a photobook, Jonathan Levitt has made a work of arresting poetry.” - Bryan Schutmaat

" A heart-wrenchingly beautiful book, Echo Mask lives at the intersection of calmness and brutality, beauty and desperation"  Andrea Modica

The photographs in Echo Mask were made primarily in the Maritime Northeast between Newfoundland and Maine, and around the mangrove islands and hardwood hammocks of the subtropical Southeast.

Inspired by natural history, mythology, and a primordial view of the natural world as a place alive and enchanted, photographer Jonathan Levitt went looking for the endangered and haunted places - natural landscapes still enlivened by intact habitat and the corresponding wild animals.

The resulting images: gannets soaring around their nests at Cape St. Mary’s; a humpback whale in the rain near Grand Manan Island at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy; wading bird rookeries in the cypress swamps near Chokoloskee in Florida, are presented in a sequence meant to evoke elements of animistic art and fossils of classical poetry from oral cultures - particularly synesthesia, transmogrification, onomatopoeia, and a non linear sense of time.