Photobooks of 2022: Jenia Fridlyand
One of my 2022 photographic highlights was hearing Judith Joy Ross talk about her work, and among many other of her ideas that resonated was the notion of using the photographic process as a means of posing and answering questions. I certainly subscribe to that notion, and find myself seduced – misguidedly, most likely – into asking increasingly complex questions and taking on ever grander themes. For this reason, it felt all the more refreshing this year to see several books that content themselves with mining a singularly small territory. Marked by a humility of spirit and an economy of means (and often by the physical touch of their maker’s hand), these books nonetheless encapsulate something quintessential about our process.
Maxwell LaBelle, Mutable River
Ruth Lauer-Manenti, One-page books
Jenia Fridlyand (Moscow, 1975) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. Fridlyand’s artist’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and trade editions were published by TIS Books in 2019 and 2020. She is represented by Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam. Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads Collective and is the chair of the Long Term Photobook Program at Penumbra Foundation in New York. She studied photography at Centre Iris and Université Paris VIII, and holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.
Images:
Edward Newton, Low Country
Maxwell LaBelle, Mutable River
