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.

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Overview

A pair of legs hang from a window, caught in the act of intrusion or escape. In pastel suburban houses, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, and foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse and bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and slot in between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet.

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.

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

Specification

254 × 286 mm
224 pages
Hardcover


Standard Edition
Jacketed hardback with rounded spine, foiled typography on case, 2.5mm boards

Special Edition
Hardback with rounded spine, 2.5mm boards, printed slipcase with tipped-on photographic image

How it works

If our funding goal is met before GMT this project will commence development. All pledges will be immediately refunded in full if the funding goal is not met.

Estimated delivery

Autumn 2025

Shipping

Tracked worldwide

The Book

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.

Mixing the everyday with a touch of the fantastical, Brooke’s photographs capture surreal moments when people are obscured, subsumed or lost in the environments around them.

Laura Snoad, Its Nice That

Special Edition

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.

When you’re dealing with a subject like art and photography, people don’t want imitation – they want creativity, they want exploration of the mind. And that’s what I think she does. It makes people wonder too.

Bob DiDonato (Brooke’s father)

Framed Print Rewards

Brooke DiDonato has hand-picked five vintage photo frames and created bespoke prints for each one. These one-of-a-kind editions playfully expand DiDonato’s aesthetic beyond the photographic image. Carefully curated to reflect recurring motifs in her work such as houses, flowers, and textiles, the frame becomes part of the work itself in a delightfully complimentary composition. DiDonato started collecting vintage picture frames in 2018 while she was visiting Ohio. After finding a stack of beautiful picture frames at an antique store, she had the idea to frame a few prints in them as special one-off editions. These unique works are available exclusively as part of this Volume campaign and include a signed certificate of authenticity.

From vast deserts to suburbia, DiDonato creates a universe which is slightly off-kilter. Bodies intertwine, trees bend backwards and iron fences become malleable. In every shot, the meanings of familiar objects are twisted; the laws of physics unhinged.

Eleanor Sutherland, Aesthetica Magazine
Meet the author

Brooke DiDonato (b. 1990) 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.

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