The photographs in this collaborative photobook were made with a variety of cameras by two parents and one child in, around, and near their home from early 2020 through the end of 2021.
IN is an experimental artist book comprised of photographs made by two parents and their child edited down from thousands of images made from the start of the pandemic lockdown at the outset of March 2020 through Spring of 2021. The book questions the notion of authorship by blending all of one family’s photos together to try to visually describe this relatable experience of feeling trapped and attempting to still find magic and wonder in a myopic world. Photographs range from our child’s pictures of her food, her dolls, her parents and her screens, to my own chronological documentation of the yearly plant and flower cycle in our backyard, to my partner’s forays into making magic and mystery through use of masks, play, and artificial strobe light. Early on in the book, you see her sixth birthday cake, and towards the conclusion, her seventh. The book is both happy and sad, light and dark, fun but claustrophobic. Viewers will relate to one family’s experience of this event of mass trauma.
“Here is a book of images that are both familiar and strange. Everything is recognizable and nothing is. I know the bubble, the isolation, but this is not exactly my bubble. This book makes me feel like we were all lost at sea in our own boats, none of us in sight of each other out there on the open water, just trusting that the other ships were sailing in the same ocean somewhere.”
—from the afterword by Cindy House
MMXXIII — VOL. LIV ROMAN NVMERALS, ‘IN’ by Benjamin Donaldson, Ottilie Leete, and Lisa Kereszi
Essay by Robert Storr.
198 pages
