drawing from ohio family life, brooke didonato’s surreal photobook evokes uncanny nostalgia

the visual artist captures images that evoke feelings of disorientation, with the resulting works teetering between the familiar and the fantastical.

myrto katsikopoulou July 18, 2024 4 min

Brooke DiDonato presents ‘Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer’

A pair of legs dangles from a window, caught in the act of either intrusion or escape. In pastel suburban houses, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, while foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse, bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and fit between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet. These surreal scenes and more emerge from Brooke DiDonato’s latest photography book, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer. Drawing from family homes in Ohio, where she comes from, the visual artist captures images that evoke feelings of nostalgia and disorientation, with the resulting works teetering between the familiar and the fantastical.

brooke didonato's surreal photography book evokes uncanny nostalgia — all images by Brooke DiDonato

a journey through surreal suburbia

Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer is the most extensive collection of Brooke DiDonato’s work to date, bringing together her most well-known bodies of work. This curated collection showcases the Texas-based artist’s singularly surreal photography, featuring compositions that challenge expectations of how space can be occupied. Torsos, legs, and arms contort into uncanny arrangements across sofas and ascend into attics. Ordinary surroundings like white picket fences, cornfields, deserts, and sidewalks become sites of unexpected psychological encounters as figures are subsumed by their environments.

DiDonato’s work stands out for its playful yet profound approach to contemporary themes. Her pictures are whimsically 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.