It is difficult to surprise us today, when photography seems to have explored every possibility. TR Ericsson achieves just that with this elegant, remarkable photobook. In Nicotine, he reimagines personal family photographs through a distinctive process: passing nicotine through a halftone silkscreen to leave a ghostly image. The resulting prints concern both the haunting presence of the past in photographs and the ephemeral nature of memory.
 
A lifelong smoker, Ericsson's mother, Sue, often stayed up late at the dining-room table with a cigarette in her hand. After her death by suicide in 2003, Ericsson faced the task of clearing her house and its nicotine-stained walls. This experience became the catalyst for the nicotine works. As he scraped away wallpaper, he thought not only about the physical stains but also about his mother, alone and awake through the night, reflecting on her past. Nicotine is an ode to her life and a meditation on the impressions that linger after a life ends. By transforming seemingly ordinary snapshots into newly conceived forms, Ericsson recontextualises and elevates the images, preserving the narratives they contain—stories that might otherwise be buried with the deceased.
 
Nicotine takes the form of an unusual, eccentric family album. Its cover is bound in luxurious tobacco-coloured suede-like fabric, evoking curtains in interiors from another era. It is a physical monument capturing the fading essence of a life once lived. Echoing a nineteenth-century scientific catalogue, each of its twenty-six images is individually tipped into the pages, recalling the meticulous care devoted to a family scrapbook. The images are created through a process of burning.