Review: Things Become Other Things
Things Become Other Things is a book by Craig Mod which was published by Random House this month. Craig is someone I have been following for many years — I was one of the first subscribers to his Special Projects membership program which has been going for over six years now, and he is a huge inspiration for me.
Craig is a writer and photographer who grew up in the United States but has been living in Japan for more than twenty years. The book is a sort of memoir about his childhood in a working class post-industrial town in America in the 90s, which he frames through a long walk through the Kii peninsula in Japan during the COVID lockdowns. The peninsula is itself a post-industrial part of Japan, albeit surrounded by a stunningful beautiful natural landscape, so there are plenty of visual parallels that spark Craig’s memory.
I don’t know of another creative person whose work and process and life I am more intimately familiar with than Craig’s. He shares a lot with his Special Projects members, and I have been watching the slow and steady process that resulted in the creation of this book over several years. The Random House publication was actually preceeded by a “fine art edition” that Craig published himself, using a custom printing process, beautiful paper and inks, and a gorgeous screen-printed cover. I own a copy of the first book he produced this way, Kissa by Kissa, but didn’t get around to buying the fine art edition of Things Become Other Things, so waited for the “major label” version: a reworked, more “mass-market” friendly version of the original text, with black and white photos instead of colour (though some of them still “full-bleed”, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a mass-market book, and they look fantastic here), and a lot more text added, but still true to the original vignette-heavy flow of the original book.
Craig wrestled with his memory and his past during this walk and managed to commit to page a poignant description of so many things at the same time: communion with nature and humanity at large, confronting the death of a childhood best friend who you lost touch with, the meaning of being adopted, asceticism and its impact on the body and the mind, addiction. And all the while you slowly feel these things becoming other things: without the pain and scarcity of his formative years, he reckons he would not be who he is today.
I really recognise and relate to the feeling of drive born of scarcity and an urgent desire to leave where you came from for somewhere where you can more fully achieve the vision of who you want to be, which is all over this book. “Becoming another thing” is a uniquely human and humbling experience, that sadly so few people manage to have. Anyone who is interested in walking, in art, in beauty and in becoming the best version of themselves should read this wonderful book.
Photograph: Things Become Other Things resting on the windowsill of my home office.