Icons - Limited edition art book

Afterword by Doug Aikenhead:

In his brief preface to ICONS, photographer-artist Roy Feldman writes of Christian religious icons as reminders of Christ’s life and his sufferings. Feldman’s icons are secular. They are the touchstones of his life events from youth to adulthood. We all have touchstones. Most often, we store them as mental images and recollections that mark the highs and lows of our lives. Feldman has made his icons visible and tangible to the rest of us.

ICONS is a book about loss. Some of Feldman’s icons acknowledge the deaths of mainstays in public life: Lincoln, Kennedy, former Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young. Some show the familiar scenes of his younger years, growing up in Detroit. The photographs that resonate most powerfully with me are those that allude to Feldman’s personal losses: of mother and father, relationships, of youth itself.

The twenty-eight photographs in ICONS are gently reproduced on soft matte paper. They are somewhat larger than the original black and white Polaroids. Their unyielding white frames both contain the deliberately crafted images and detach them from their real-world contexts. They are like recurrent dream images, transient yet frozen, sometimes haunting: the Lincoln assassination chair, shrouded with heavy drapes and almost ghostly on a tiny stage; an opaque willow tree silhouetted against a vaporous landscape; the framed uniform, hat, and folded flag from an airman’s death; Feldman’s childhood home, almost suffocating in its tight Polaroid frame; and all the others, tied together as increments in Feldman’s life, and as pages in this intriguing book. With its concise commentary, Feldman’s ICONS brings a matured reckoning to experiences that have shaped him. Icons can be portals through which we revisit losses and move beyond them.