Threefold Sun

Who it's for

For the parent who chose Waldorf not because it was trendy but because something in them recognized a different way of seeing the world. For the family whose bookshelves hold hand-dyed wool and worn copies of fairy tales alongside art books from museums they actually go to. For the person who still hasn't found a coffee table book that looks like their life.

What it is

Threefold Sun was made during extended time spent inside communities shaped by the life and philosophy of Rudolf Steiner — Waldorf schools, biodynamic farms, intentional landscapes across the United States. Shot on medium-format film in warm, unhurried color, these photographs don't document a philosophy. They find its texture: the chalkboard message, the rubber boots by the door, the sledding hill with not quite enough snow, the tree house built with the kind of care that says permanence.

The critic Carol Mavor, whose essay accompanies the work, wrote of these images as simultaneously beautiful and banal — utopia in a patch of afternoon sun, a smudge of mud, the completely ordinary.

Work from this series is held in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Sir Elton John Collection, and has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe.

Details

Published by Charta Editions, Milan (2007). Hardcover. Essay by Carol Mavor. Limited remaining 1st Edition copies are being sold directly from the artist's studio inventory. 50 color photographs produced on analog film and offset printed on Heidelberg presses in Italy. Stitch binding. 136 pages.

Why it belongs in your home

This is a book for slow mornings. It belongs somewhere someone will pick it up without being asked, and put it down different. It's an exceptional gift for the Waldorf teacher, the CSA member, the parent who has always understood that beauty and usefulness aren't opposites.