Brooke DiDonato presents ‘Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer’
A pair of legs dangles from a window, caught in the act of either intrusion or escape. In pastel suburban houses, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, while foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse, bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and fit between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet. These surreal scenes and more emerge from Brooke DiDonato’s latest photography book, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer. Drawing from family homes in Ohio, where she comes from, the visual artist captures images that evoke feelings of nostalgia and disorientation, with the resulting works teetering between the familiar and the fantastical.
all images by Brooke DiDonato
Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer is the most extensive collection of Brooke DiDonato’s work to date, bringing together her most well-known bodies of work. This curated collection showcases DiDonato’s singularly surreal photography, with compositions that challenge expectations of how space can be occupied. Torsos, legs, and arms contort into uncanny arrangements across sofas and ascend into attics. Ordinary surroundings like white picket fences, cornfields, 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 – poignantly touching upon contemporary anxieties and universal themes of love and loss.
Limited to 200 copies, the Special Edition is bound in an elegant, muted pink imitation cloth with clear foil-stamped typographic design and is signed by the artist. This is housed in a handmade slipcase featuring a lavish floral design taken from DiDonato’s personal textile collection, finished with a tipped-on photographic element of her work Looking Back (2022). This exclusive edition includes an 8 × 11 inch reproduction of DiDonato’s iconic self-portrait Next-door (2014), printed on 300gsm Munken Lynx Smooth Natural White and signed by the artist.
