LEXINGTON, VA, UNITED STATES, October 22, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — “As I Found It: My Mother’s House,” an affecting new photography monograph from art book publisher Kehrer Verlag, offers a very different view of dementia and Alzheimer’s than familiar documentary images of these diseases’ sufferers and their caregivers. Using carefully crafted interior and still-life photographs, artist Russell Hart tells the story of his mother’s cognitive decline in an open-ended manner that will resonate with anybody who has dealt with a loved one’s dementia and had to sift through the things they’ve left behind.
The author’s mother was a lifelong hoarder, filling her house of over forty years with thousands of acquired and inherited objects. This vexing behavior was driven by both practicality and sentimentality, causing her to save everything from bits of string to the carefully coiled leash of her much-loved, long-gone family dog. Unlike many hoarders, though, she was also an obsessive organizer who neatly arranged her huge collection into hundreds of boxes. The author discovered that many of these boxes had been cut into cardboard trays containing individual compartments, schemes she could no longer explain because of her dementia. “As I Found It: My Mother’s House” (PDF of book) presents their contents with a clarity and tenderness that captures her personality and the family life that meant so much to her.
A lifelong magazine writer and editor, Russell Hart provides important context to the book’s photographs with an introduction that traces his mother’s final years and explains his need to create the project. Further texts and captions contribute a poetic quality to the work, making it as much a meditation on the pathos of objects as it is a portrait in absentia. Yet all of this information is sparing, leaving room for readers and viewers to recall their own experience of caring for aging parents and preserving a lifetime’s memories—and, no less important, the ways in which those struggles revisit and reinvent the meaning of family.
Specifications: “As I Found It: My Mother’s House,” photographs and text by Russell Hart; hardcover, 11×11.5 inches, 58 duotone illustrations; ISBN 978-3-96900-152-3; $56.00
About the author: Russell Hart’s artwork has been widely exhibited at American museums and galleries, and he is the recipient of three traveling fellowships from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has taught photography at Tufts University and the Boston Museum School, and currently teaches in the Master’s in digital photography program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Hart was for many years executive editor of American Photo, winner of ASME’s National Magazine Award; received the 2003 Gold Medal for Best General Feature from the International Regional Magazine Association; and in 2009 was awarded the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Susan Sontag Scribe Award for best photographic writing. Hart is the author of the original Photography For Dummies and co-author of the Pearson/Prentice-Hall college textbook Photography, along with several other books on photographic subjects.
Russell Hart
Kehrer Verlag
+1 914-450-8534
russellhart@mac.com
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