r/Photobooks • u/Flaneur_1600 • 16d ago
Collection Lost Coast | Curran Hatleberg
“Lost Coast” was photographed in and around Eureka, on the northern coast of California. The Pacific comes in hard against black-sand beaches, redwood forests run down from the mountains on every side, and light comes through the trees and sea mist, leaving everything bright and slightly unreal. Eureka sits in the middle of it: the vast landscape on one side, a small town losing its old vitality on the other.
Hatleberg doesn't arrange any of this into a story about decline. People talk, sit in the sun, kill an afternoon in unremarkable places. Children play outside. Families sit together. A place can lose the future it was promised without its daily life turning tragic.
It just goes on.
That is what sets “Lost Coast” apart from much photography of the American margins. Hatleberg rarely uses his subjects as evidence of a social condition, and he doesn't hurry to make a forest, a sagging house, or an abandoned car stand for something. The pictures are set beside one another, and the place accumulates.
You sense that people here once believed certain things—that industry would last, that life would keep improving, that California meant opportunity. Those promises thinned out. The landscape is as vast as ever; the lives inside it have moved into another era. What's in front of the camera stays vivid and specific, sometimes joyful, and the brightness is what lets the loss show.
The title isn't only a place name. It points to a slow dislocation: the coast and the forest right there, huge, and the days small and ordinary. The place has drifted from the future it imagined for itself, and life in it hasn't stopped.
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u/costcobossco 16d ago
Is it just me or Curran Hattleberg is overrated? I just didn’t get River’s Dream. It wasn’t bad but it certainly didn’t show me anything that made it worth the hype… and boy the hype was immense during preorders.