Allison Grant – Within the Bittersweet

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Woven into the pages of Allison Grant’s almost family album Within the Bittersweet are questions that pack a punch. What future are we giving our children? What will the land that they inherit look like? Will they grow up physically scarred by the way we have treated our environment? How can we protect them? What should we do? Grant’s response as an artist and mother is her photobook Within the Bittersweet.

“Bittersweet” is an especially apt name. The photographs are by turns bitter and sweet. They depict poison and protection, danger and safety, evil and innocence.

The recipe for the book’s secret sauce involves roughly two parts children / loved ones and one part nature, sprinkled with one part industrial pollution. You turn the pages and view children playing in a creek, for example, and then you see a polluted creek. You see a young girl on a path and then a road leading to a coal mine. You see a child swimming and then a coal “washing pond.” You see a child at home after school and then smoke rising from a chemical fire burning next to her school.

There is no text in the book other than the captions at the end. The book’s visual narrative works without them, but they add a layer of meaning. Thanks to the captions we see that there are several portraits of Grant with one of her daughters: “As My Mother, So I,” “Me Gripping Baby,” “Invisible Mother,” “Mother Cover.” In total six captions include the word “mother” or “mom.” Besides being about our place in nature, the many photographs of Grant’s children in the book set up another theme – being a mother – with its attendant emotions and the strength and fragility of its relationships, especially given the daunting reality of mothering on a damaged planet.

The sequencing is varied: full-bleed single, page-and-a-half, or two-page spreads; portrait layouts with narrow or somewhat wider margins; and blank pages here and there for pacing. Grant has an eye for deep, dramatic shadows, and they are printed in many cases without much if any detail, a move that heightens the intensity of the visual moment.

I have never visited Alabama and was curious about the legacy of the coal mining pollution depicted in Bittersweet. Was it as bad as it looked? Google maps indeed revealed the ugly scars of several functioning Warrior Met Coal facilities east of Grant’s home in Tuscaloosa. The “Met” in the name is because this kind of coal is used in steel production – metal. I also spotted a funny-looking bright-green lake south of town. It was next to exposed land used in minerals production, and it was hard to tell if the color came from algae or pollution, but it didn’t look healthy.

The personal is political, the political personal, and as she travels her artistic path Allison Grant makes a good case why.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Allison Grant – Within the Bittersweet

Photographer: Allison Grant (born in 1981, lives in Alabama)

Language: English

Design: COMPOSIT and Holly Thompson

Printing: COMPOSIT, Oregon State University

Cloth hardcover ; 67 color photographs; Swiss binding, 112 pages, paginated; 8.25 x 10.75 inches, ISBN 979-8-9987660-0-8

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.