Review by Hans Hickerson ·
Photobooks today explore themes that photographers of previous generations never would have imagined. You name it, and some intrepid photographer is turning it into a photobook. There are books, for example, that deal with family relationships, memories of past times, emotional landscapes, and problematic real-life situations. Sunniva Hestenes’ A Tear for Someone Undeserving for its part deals with all of the above.
The real-life situation is the sudden death of Hestenes’ alcoholic mother. We see photos of her while alive drinking in bed and with a black eye, and then her body in a coffin. We also see several snapshots of her when she was much younger and images of Hestenes and Hestenes’ father. This back and forth in time blurs things. It suggests that people live on as memories in others and that memories are what is left for us to keep.
The emotional landscape embodied by the images and text is Hestenes in the process of grieving and sorting things out. There are a number of pictures that evoke death and the fragility of life, including a road-killed deer, a scythe in front of a field of flowers, and the embers of a fire rising into the night sky and disappearing. Taken out of the context of the book, some of the photographs could mean almost anything, but as narrative elements in A Tear for Someone Undeserving they pop with metaphorical power: a horse, its head covered with flies; a bouquet of flowers lying on a tiled floor; the flash-lit red eye of hare caught crossing the road at dusk; a pile of crumpled white rock, billowing dust or smoke.
The book’s technique of mixing up flashback photos, contemporaneous photos, and photos in the “out-there-other” category dissolves the viewer’s time / space point of view and as in a novel or film leaves you in a real, fictionalized narrative space. Sorry if that sounds a bit hocus-pocus, but how else to describe how photographs in books can be freighted with meaning, how they can take on purpose and direction beyond what they obviously depict?
The eclectic choices extend to the layout and editing. Thirty-one photographs are in color and some half-dozen are black and white. The majority are landscape orientation, one or two to a page spread. There are also several larger portrait orientations as well as a few images printed full-bleed over a two-page spread. And an insert of smaller-dimensioned pages appears partway through the book, adding an element of unpredictability to the design.
Hestenes’ text at the end of the book, in Norwegian, describes their feelings and shares images of their visit to the hospital morgue:
I had to sit down. It was as if she pretended to be asleep. I didn’t know if I wanted to throw up or cry. My father said nothing; he just sighed and rubbed his forehead. I couldn’t look at her, and I didn’t know what to do with myself.
What Hestenes did do was take photographs and assemble a photobook about the experience. Raw and direct, it channels painful personal memories and experiences into the present where they can be processed and put to rest.
Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.
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Sunniva Hestenes – A Tear for Someone Undeserving
Photographer: Sunniva Hestenes (born in 1999 in Norway; lives in Copenhagen)
Publisher: Heavy Books, Oslo © 2024
Language: Norwegian
Text: Sunniva Hestenes
Design: Spine Studio
Printed in Italy
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