Poignant New Coffee-Table Book Brings a Fresh Perspective to Dementia’s Toll on Memory and Identity
LEXINGTON, Va., October 16, 2024 (Newswire.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.
“More than a catalog of possessions… [the book] is a portrait of a life.” —B+W Photography Magazine
As I Found It: My Mother’s House, photographs and text by Russell Hart; hardcover, 11x11.5 inches, 58 duotone illustrations; ISBN 978-3-96900-152-3; $56.00
Russell Hart’s artwork has been widely exhibited at museums and galleries, and he has received three traveling fellowships from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. He taught photography at Tufts and the Boston Museum School and currently teaches in the Master’s 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.
Source: Kehrer Verlag
