Half a Chisel to the Earth by Tommy Nease

First published in 2022, Only 100 copies.

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Tommy Nease’s collection of photographs detail landscape in constant flux.

The book is speaking directly, it feels like it’s trying to remind us of what we forget in the rush to define ourselves—our names, our plans, our edges. It talks to us not with answers, but with textures. It’s saying: you are not separate from the dust or the stars or the thicket. It doesn’t comfort in a traditional sense, but it offers a kind of kinship, inviting us to see our fragility and confusion as part of something bigger, something always shifting but deeply real.

It’s also trying to speak about the body—not as burden or shell, but as archive, ritual, echo. It tells us that our skeletons aren’t just the end, they’re part of the story—the lightning and the warning, the breath left in snow. It wants us to see how memory, pain, and motion live inside our muscles, in the terrain we cross. There’s tenderness in that, even when it’s raw.

And when it talks about time and vision, it’s gently nudging us: you don’t have to see everything clearly. It tucks the head into the future because it knows clarity isn’t the goal—presence is. The book doesn’t offer a straight path. Instead, it speaks in spirals, showing us that becoming isn’t a neat progression. It’s messy. It’s interwoven. It’s holy in its confusion.

So maybe the book isn’t explaining the world—it’s inviting us to sit with it. To feel the breath in the rubble, to recognize that light doesn’t always know which way to bend, and that this is not failure. It’s just the way of things. And maybe that, in itself, is a kind of wisdom.