Brooke DiDonato
Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer

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.