Brooke DiDonato: Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer

The debut monograph from the inimitable photographer, exploring the strangeness lurking behind the ordinary in everyday life.

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer is a curated collection of Brooke DiDonato’s singularly surreal photography. Evoking feelings of nostalgia or disorientation, DiDonato’s work teeters between the familiar and the fantastical. Inspired by family homes in Ohio, her compositions challenge expectations of how space can be occupied. Torsos, legs and arms contort into uncanny arrangements across sofas and ascend into attics. Ordinary surroundings often have a compelling presence – white picket fences, corn fields, deserts and sidewalks become sites of unexpected psychological encounters as figures are subsumed by their environments. Her pictures are playfully titled – Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns – and poignantly touch upon contemporary anxieties and universal themes of love and loss.

The most extensive collection of DiDonato’s work to date, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer brings together her most well-known bodies of work, including A House is Not a Home, alongside new works published here in print for the first time. A short introduction from writer Eleanor Sutherland provides an overview of DiDonato’s practice, while an intimate conversation between Emmy award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and Brooke’s father, Bob DiDonato, offers a personal glimpse into her evolution as an artist.

A one-of-a-kind photographic experience, DiDonato’s first monograph invites us into her beguiling world, daring us to stare a little longer.

Review

'Brings together DiDonato’s surreal work in a collection that blends nostalgia, humour and unease' - Wallpaper*

About the Author

Brooke DiDonato is a visual artist from Ohio based in Austin, Texas. DiDonato’s images propose scenes of everyday life distorted by visual anomalies. Extreme landscapes and domestic spaces stand in for the subconscious mind while bizarre scenarios call into question the boundaries of reality. Eleanor Sutherland is an arts writer, editor and the creative producer of Aesthetica Magazine.