Meat, Fish & Aubergine Caviar — Alex Blanco. Published by Overlapse.
Alex Blanco left home at age 16 to escape from a complex domestic life with her parents. Years later she returned to the Ukrainian city of Odessa on the Black Sea to care for her father recovering from an illness and found a path to engage with her parents through the daily rituals of food preparation and communal dining. Her intimate photographs made over 6 years introduce us to their uniquely individual personalities and how the kitchen table is the anchor of their existence. The portraits Alex made of her mother with vegetables and other ingredients are classical and collaborative, which along her first-person text and the inclusion of her mother’s recipes lend a lighthearted glimpse into this challenging moment in time for the three of them.
The use of color/black & white, as well as still-life and abstract images, amplify the stress and occasional joy of being together again in a self-created utopian environment. The softbound cover wrap with flat spine is bound into the wire binding, referencing shared community cookbooks.
Mary Virginia Swanson (Tucson, Arizona) is an author, educator and advisor to artists. Swanson co-authored with Darius Himes the acclaimed Publish Your Photography Book: 3rd Edition (Radius Books, 2023). She frequently serves as a judge on contemporary photobook competitions and lectures at on publishing photobooks today.
mvswanson.com
@maryvirginiaswanson