Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer

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

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.