YEAR ZERO

“Richard Edson's Year Zero Lockdown Journal is a dramatic eyewitness account of 2020-21 in Los Angeles, his observations matched by a cavalcade of images, turns moody, haunted, ominous, meditative, and reassuringly banal--then the police riots following the murder of George Floyd turn the mode to combat photography. This book is terrific, the pictures and design are perfect.”- Lucy Sante (Writer, Critic, and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) “Richard Edson’s Year Zero Lockdown Journal marks a unique and riveting addition to the genre of Covid Lit. With a voice all his own and photographs that capture the dark heart of plague-time Los Angeles, Edson’s vision is evocative of work as diverse as Bill Owens, WB Sebald, or Bukowski if he owned a camera. Edson’s text and photos make this the perfect tome to curl up with and ride out the next pandemic.-   Jerry Stahl (Novelist & Screenwriter of Permanent Midnight) “Richard Edson has always expressed a contemplative nature laced with humor, mostly at the absurdity so rife in the human condition. It’s what you see in his photography, glean from his words, and hear in his music. You certainly see it in his evocative and beautiful visage. The pandemic year seems like a bad dream we’ve all woken from and do not want to hear about again. But, in Richard’s photo-journal, initially recounting a  frightened and confused state – as so many of us were in – leading into conflicted feelings of self-regard through forced isolation, and then to the group activism spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, the power of resistance refuting the discombobulation of community, Richard encounters his essence– that of positive vibrations, the manifest of his drums, his trumpet, his poetry and prose, alive in conversation, in exchange, sharing, caring, daring, and staying aware – come hell or high water. This is a magnificent read.”- Thurston Moore (Guitarist and Founding member of Sonic Youth) “During the pandemic, Richard Edson chose to venture out daily, with bicycle and camera, to discover once-familiar, even mundane details now transformed by a new, unpredicted perspective. Finding a quiet beauty in a world suddenly stopped, and later a turbulent energy heightened by social disturbances and the powerful BLM movement, what accumulates is a very moving personal document but one resonating with planetary implications.” – Jim Jarmusch (Film Director, Screenwriter and Producer of Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, Ghost Dog, and Only Lovers Left Alive)