Liquid Cities

Liquid Cities (alt take) is Frank Rodick's 2014 follow-up to Of Liquid Cities and Celestial Abattoirs, his 2013 book built from two long-running darkroom-based series, Liquid City and Arena.

Published by AkinaBooks in a limited edition of 100, now sold out, the book gathers an alternate sequence of images from the same body of work: dense, layered, heavily worked photographs made across Tokyo, Paris, London and New York, dealing in what the publisher Alex Bocchetto called "hallucinations of sex and death" and a "non-euclidian space with its own set of rules where the raw power of the unconscious resurfaces through subliminal images." The original 2013 book was named one of the top ten photobooks of the year by Eric Miles for ICP's Monsters & Madonnas.

Rodick, born in Montreal to a family of booksellers, trained in psychology and worked for years as a psychotherapist while developing his photography as a self-taught darkroom printer. He produced Liquid City, sub rosa and Arena through unconventional darkroom and printing techniques. He then moved the same sensibility into digital imaging in later series such as Frances and The Moons of Saturn. His work has been described as addressing the same territory of human extremity that preoccupied Goya and Francis Bacon, and was the subject of the 2010 survey catalogue Labyrinth of Desire, curated by Katherine Ware.