Life, Labor, and Uncertainty in an Appalachian University Town
Published by Liars Corner
1804 continues Rich-Joseph Facun’s ongoing exploration of life in the Appalachian foothills of Southeast Ohio, turning his attention toward the local university and its deeply intertwined, often contradictory relationship with the surrounding community. Through a nuanced and atmospheric body of work, Facun examines the social fabric of a region where education, labor, politics, and identity collide in subtle yet profound ways.
Named after the year the university was founded, 1804 reflects on the institution not simply as a place of learning, but as the economic and cultural engine of the region itself. In this rural Appalachian landscape, the university functions as a progressive enclave situated within a predominantly conservative environment. It brings students, ideas, and opportunities from outside the region while simultaneously reshaping the rhythms, aspirations, and tensions of the local population. The result is a relationship built on dependence, friction, adaptation, and mutual survival.
Facun’s photographs move beyond straightforward documentary. Quiet portraits, landscapes, interiors, and observational moments reveal the invisible structures that define everyday life in a modern university town. Students navigating uncertainty, workers sustaining institutional systems, fading commercial spaces, temporary housing, athletic culture, and symbols of regional identity all become part of a broader visual narrative about economic fragility and cultural transformation.
The project also confronts the growing instability facing many American universities, particularly in rural regions already vulnerable to economic decline. After enduring the financial disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the institution now faces a new period of uncertainty marked by federal funding cuts enacted during the Trump administration, staff layoffs, canceled international student visas, and increasing concern over the nationwide decline in high school graduates—the very population upon which future enrollment depends.
Within this context, 1804 becomes more than a portrait of a campus or a small Appalachian town. It is a meditation on the precarious future of communities built around a single institution and the shifting realities of contemporary America. Facun captures a place suspended between resilience and vulnerability, asking a quietly urgent question: are we witnessing the slow transformation of a regional success story into another chapter of economic decline?
At its core, the project explores how systems of education, labor, and belonging shape personal and collective identity. By documenting the tensions between permanence and impermanence, optimism and anxiety, growth and erosion, Facun creates a powerful reflection on what happens when an institution that once symbolized stability begins to reveal its fragility.
Rich-Joseph Facun
Rich-Joseph Facun is an Otomi and Pinoy storyteller, photographer, and publisher presently based in the Appalachian Foothills of southeast Ohio. His work aims to offer an authentic look into ways in which individual identity is influenced by the economic, geographic, and community norms of a given landscape. The exploration of place and cultural identity present themselves as a common denominator in both his life and his photographic endeavors.
Facun’s photography has been commissioned by various publications, including NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, NBC News, AARP, The Associated Press, Reuters, Vox, Adweek, Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The FADER, Frank 151, Topic, The Guardian (UK), The National (UAE), Telerama (France), The Globe and Mail (Canada) and Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), among others.
Additionally, his work has been recognized by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, CNN, Juxtapoz, British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post, American Photography, Feature Shoot, It’s Nice That, The Image Deconstructed, The Photo Brigade, Looking At Appalachia, and Pictures of the Year International.
In 2021 Facun’s first monograph Black Diamonds was released by Fall Line Press. The work is a visual exploration of the former coal mining boom towns of SE Ohio, Appalachia. Subsequently, it was highlighted by Charcoal Book Club as their “Book-Of-The-Month.” Black Diamonds is also part of the permanent collection at the Frederick and Kazuko Harris Fine Arts Library and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s Research Library.
His second monograph Little Cities, was released in Autumn 2022 by Little Oak Press. The work examines how both Indigenous peoples and descendants of settler colonialists inhabited and utilized the land around them.
1804, Facun’s third monograph, considers the ways in which heritage, socioeconomics, and youth culture are shaped by the dominant institution within an Appalachian town. facun.com @facun
ABOUT LIARS CORNER:
Liars Corner is an Appalachia-based boutique publisher of fine art books committed to amplifying the voices of marginalized and underrepresented communities. We believe that stories from these perspectives are essential to shaping culture, preserving memory, and creating deeper connections between people. Our work is grounded in the oral storytelling traditions of Indigenous and Appalachian communities—where storytelling has long served as a vessel for history, belief, and belonging.
The name Liars Corner is inspired by Millfield, Ohio storyteller Carl Brown, who brought people together around a campfire in the Appalachian foothills to share stories. He affectionately called the gathering spot “Liars Corner” in honor of the friendly competition to tell the tallest tale—a celebration of imagination, creativity, and communal joy.
In that same spirit, we collaborate with artists to turn their narratives into books that honor the past while exploring new creative possibilities. Each project is a dialogue—between image and design, artist and audience, tradition and innovation. We aim to preserve the enduring power of storytelling while pushing the boundaries of the book as an artistic medium. www.liarscorner.press
Publisher : Dewi Lewis Publishing & Martin Parr Foundation
2026 | 60 pages
"The pictures from The Last Resort still hold up brilliantly. If I ever reach the Pearly Gates, those are the ones I’d probably pull out first!" – Martin Parr
Published in collaboration with the Martin Parr Foundation, this special edition accompanies a tribute exhibition at the Foundation’s Bristol gallery, honouring Martin Parr following his passing in December. Shot in and around the English seaside town of New Brighton between 1983 and 1985, The Last Resort remains a landmark in British colour documentary photography, establishing Parr as one of the nation’s most influential photographers.
This volume presents a carefully curated selection of images from the iconic series, alongside extensive archival material, including contact sheets, photographs, and ephemera drawn from Martin’s personal collection. Isaac Blease, Archivist at the Foundation, provides insight into the project’s origins, exploring the artistic and cultural influences that prompted Parr’s shift from black-and-white to colour photography, as well as the series’ initial exhibitions in Liverpool and at London’s Serpentine Gallery.
Peter Brawne, designer of the original 1986 book, reflects on the creative process behind the design and his collaboration with Martin, while Susie Parr, Martin’s wife, contributes a personal account of New Brighton and the first public presentation of the work at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery in 1985.
Richly illustrated and thoughtfully contextualized, this book offers both longtime admirers and new readers a unique glimpse into the development of Martin Parr’s iconic vision and the vibrant world of British seaside life that inspired it.
Nathalie Rubens: Seasons of Time marks a thoughtful and intimate debut, tracing the subtle thresholds that define a woman’s life. In this carefully composed photobook, Nathalie Rubens reflects on two parallel passages: her daughter Ruby’s emergence into young adulthood and her own transition into post-menopausal life. Through this mirrored gaze, the work becomes a meditation on continuity and change, revealing how beginnings and endings often unfold side by side.
Rubens turns the camera inward and outward with equal tenderness. Portraits of Ruby capture the fragile confidence and uncertainty of youth—moments poised between dependence and independence. In contrast, self-portraits confront the physical and emotional transformations of midlife with quiet candor. The images resist sentimentality; instead, they dwell in nuance, acknowledging vulnerability while affirming resilience. The body, in its evolving forms, becomes both subject and witness to time’s passage.
Domestic interiors, shared gestures, and fleeting glances anchor the book in lived experience. Light filters through windows, falls across skin, and settles on everyday objects, creating a rhythm that echoes the seasons invoked in the title. Rubens approaches aging not as decline, but as a shifting landscape—one marked by introspection, memory, and renewed self-awareness. The dialogue between mother and daughter unfolds without hierarchy, suggesting that each stage of life carries its own clarity and its own mystery.
Deeply personal yet widely relatable, Seasons of Time speaks to the universality of transition. It honors the complexity of female identity as something neither fixed nor singular, but constantly in motion. Through measured composition and emotional honesty, Rubens crafts a visual reflection on growth, separation, and connection. The result is a quiet affirmation that time, though relentless, can also be a source of understanding and grace, binding generations even as it gently transforms them.
The structural organization of the biosphere is the primary subject of Patterns: Art of the Natural World, a comprehensive visual catalog by Australian photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack. The work operates on the premise that life and geology are governed by a shared geometry, manifested in the recurring arrangements found within botanical specimens, animal migration routes, and topographical transformations. McCormack utilizes high-resolution digital sensors to isolate these rhythms, presenting a data-rich look at the physical world that spans from the macro-scale of elephant trails in the Kenyan savanna to the micro-textures of fossilized feathers. This survey functions as an empirical record of the planet’s innate design, emphasizing the mathematical consistency of natural forms across disparate ecosystems.
The geographical scope of the project encompasses a wide range of extreme environments, including the volcanic coastlines of Iceland and the sub-zero fjords of Antarctica. McCormack documents the silent, systemic logic of the earth, such as the intricate symmetry found within the ice caves of Svalbard and the rhythmic branching of tree rings. A significant portion of the archive focuses on the photographer’s local environment in California, where the interplay of desert erosion and coastal tides provides a laboratory for studying the evolution of landforms. By removing the distraction of color in certain instances or utilizing flat lighting, the imagery highlights the "technofossils" of the natural world—the enduring structures that define the history of a landscape and its inhabitants.
Supplementing the visual evidence are a series of short essays penned by a multidisciplinary group of scientists and explorers. These texts provide a theoretical framework for the photographs, explaining the biological and physical forces that generate specific patterns, such as the fractals in river deltas or the hexagonal tiling of basalt columns. This collaboration ensures that the book remains a rigorous journalistic inquiry into the interconnectedness of life rather than a purely aesthetic exercise. As ecosystems face unprecedented pressure from climate instability, Patterns stands as a definitive document of the planet’s foundational architecture, recording the complex symmetries that underpin global biodiversity before they are irrevocably altered by human intervention.
Albert Watson: Kaos is a masterful survey of one of photography’s most influential voices, spanning five decades of work that oscillates between intimacy and spectacle. Watson’s photographs are at once meticulously composed and viscerally immediate, capturing both the iconic and the unexpected with equal authority.
KAOS charts Watson’s journey from his breakthrough Alfred Hitchcock portrait in 1973 to the present, revealing the astonishing range of his vision. Across its pages, readers encounter a kaleidoscope of subjects: celebrities in revealing vulnerability, strangers in fleeting urban moments, wildlife in arresting stillness, and landscapes that shimmer with elemental power. Each frame is a study in light, shadow, and narrative tension, embodying Watson’s extraordinary ability to render the familiar as extraordinary.
The book moves fluidly between worlds. Supermodels and pop icons—David Bowie, Kate Moss, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez, Mick Jagger—sit alongside anonymous figures in neon-lit cities and remote Scottish landscapes, their presence amplified by Watson’s uncanny sense of timing and composition. From sensuous nudes to stark urban street photography, his work explores surface beauty while hinting at the emotional and psychological depth beneath. Watson’s camera captures not only what is seen, but the subtle textures of human experience: desire, humor, solitude, and magnetism.
Accompanied by an essay from Philippe Garner and enriched with Watson’s own reflections, as well as previously unpublished Polaroids from his personal archive, KAOS is both an authoritative career retrospective and a deeply personal document. The photographs pulse with cinematic allure, formal precision, and the irrepressible vitality of a life spent observing the world in its most dynamic and intimate moments.
Presented in a sumptuous hardcover, with optional signed Art Editions including exclusive prints, Albert Watson: Kaos is a definitive celebration of an artist whose work continues to inspire photographers, collectors, and enthusiasts around the globe, capturing a universe simultaneously chaotic, poetic, and utterly compelling.
