James Tunks: Zone

Perimeter Editions, 2025, softcover, 48 pages, 28 x 21 cm

In ‘ZONE’, James Tunks plays at the peripheries of new and old knowledge. An anonymous text sets its protagonist in a kind of fever dream. Alone, abroad, and in possession of a secret camera prototype of unimaginable image-making power, he considers the implications and sheer scope of the device’s advancements. Using flashes of colour as a foil for meticulously detailed black and white, the subjects and their underlying symbolism whisper to both the past and present of the technological, explorative, concealed, and classified. Image-making teeters between the ability to capture microscopic detail and the capability to cause disruption on a mass scale. Our philosophical understanding of the photograph may find its bearings in notions of time and the past, but our tools for making images are imbedded in the aggressive stride of technological innovation and forward thinking. Cameras now possess the ability to sense, capture, process, describe, augment, predict, and ‘think’, in increasingly pervasive ways. And like most computational devices, the camera is not immune to the disruptive forces of AI and machine learning. ZONE – Vienna-based Australian artist James Tunks’s third book with Perimeter Editions – seems to gesture towards this dynamic. Using flashes of searing colour as a foil for precise, meticulously detailed black and white, Tunks’s subjects and their underlying symbolism whisper to both the history and the present of the technological, explorative, concealed, and classified. Birds of prey and the Apollo Mission insignia sit alongside remote Icelandic landscapes used for lunar exploration research; blinding full-bleed images of the sun interrupt hyper-detailed telescopic photographs of the moon. Fragmented portraits reveal their own photographic processes; images echo, mirror, and double, offering shifting vantages, perspectives, and dissections.