Coherence

Coherence pairs the black-and-white photographs of Frank Ward with stories by Vivian Leskes, a lifetime of images gathered from Bodhgaya to Stonehenge to the fields closer to home. The book takes its name from a night in 1969, when Ward, a young photographer with a secondhand Nikon and a single roll of film, exposed the same frames three times over. Developing those overlapping negatives, he found the picture had organized itself into something whole, and understood that his work was less to compose the world than to stay open to the coherence already in it. What follows is that practice across decades and continents: quiet, attentive portraits and landscapes, each set beside a story by Leskes that gives it place and meaning. It is a book about seeing, and about the patience it takes to let a photograph become itself.