Charcoal Book Club – October 2019
About the Book: Entrance to Our Valley by Jenia Fridlyand
In 2017, Jenia Fridlyand created an artist’s book that sold out its limited run quickly and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Photobook Prize. In September of 2019 the trade edition was published by TIS Books. Printed offset tritone in Turkey with some of the same production values as the artist’s book: oversize vertical orientation; soft binding; very light, uncoated paper - it sold out immediately.
Fridlyand uses her 4x5 view camera with remarkable flexibility and subtlety, rendering not only carefully considered landscapes, but also domestic scenes of surprise and spontaneity. The result is a not so much a narrative as it is an atmosphere; not descriptive of experience but rather evocative of it. One senses ultimately the climate (both literally and figuratively) of the valley in which her immediate and extended family is making a new home for itself. Pictures of the simplest activities of housekeeping – eating and sleeping, planting and harvesting the garden, playing chess – are imbued with the richness of joy and gratitude in Fridlyand’s tender compositions and juxtapositions of interior and exterior life.
signed copy
first edition, now out-of-print
26 cm x 40 cm
foil stamped softbound cover
80 pages
37 tritone images
