Mark Alice Durant’s latest book, Running, Falling, Flying, Floating, Crawling, published by his imprint Saint Lucy Books aggregates more than 50 contemporary, historical and vernacular photographers who use representations of the body as symbols of uncertainty, distress, humor, and dissonance. In Tabitha Soren's Dave, it’s terror – a man runs across a New York City street looking up in fear. For those who were alive at the time, we might conjure 9/11 imagery. A nation at war in constant panic.

In William Lamson’s Sublunar No. 23, it’s fun, conceptual, and performative. A group of white-suited maybe-astronauts, maybe-daredevils bounce a helmeted body off a makeshift trampoline into a deep black sky beckoning viewers to maybe laugh, maybe smile, and maybe scratch our heads. In Rania Matar’s Alae, Khiyam Lebanon, a Lebanese Muslim woman sits in a stream, almost cradling it, almost sleeping.
Yet it's clear she is collaborating with the photographer to convey calm and vulnerability.

Durant invited some of photography's most prominent curators, poets, and critics to respond to these images and offer context and meaning apart from the series to which they belong. It’s a book you’ll want to sit with for a while, one that will continue to evolve as we understand these images as stand-ins for an increasingly confusing and uncertain world.

I spoke with Durant to learn more about his thinking on this thoughtfully existential project.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Mark Alice Durant