MACK Books recently released Ahndraya Parlato’s latest book, Time To Kill, an evocative interrogation of gendered aging, unpacking the ideals of beauty, caretaking, and maternal and domestic duty imposed on women over the course of their lives. It unfolds through a compelling combination of image and text, with photographs encompassing portraits of women, landscapes, and spaces that are both vast and claustrophobic, as well as still lifes in which plants, ice, domestic objects, and weapons are absurdly combined, alluding to impermanence and cultural double standards.
This distinctive visuality is interwoven with letters written by Parlato to an ambiguous, ageless, and perhaps illusory recipient. Through these entwined mediums, the artist looks both out and in, reckoning with a wild variety of physical and emotional experiences including the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how others see us as we age. Bodily transformation and the passing of time are pictured as both brutal and freeing as Parlato carves out a psychological space to contend with her fears and fantasies around aging in ways verging on the eerie and surreal. Building on the rich visual language of Parlato’s celebrated book Who is Changed and Who is Dead (2021), TIME TO KILL examines selfhood, motherhood, sacrifice, and visibility in an unflinching confrontation with what it means to be mortal.
Ahndraya Parlato has published three other books: Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead (2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange (2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, in collaboration with Gregory Halpern (2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Double Feature (2025), Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (2021), and The Photographer’s Playbook (2014). TIME TO KILL will be exhibited at the George Eastman Museum in 2026. Parlato has also exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; The Aperture Foundation, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ahndraya Parlato : Time To Kill
MACK
Embossed hardcover
22 x 28 cm, 144 pages
ISBN 978-1-917651-42-4
€50 £45 $55 AU$105
https://mackbooks.co.uk/
