Life is still a garden, don’t say otherwise
Veronika Trubnikova
We opted for a Swiss binding, which combines two paper stocks and formats to mark the shift between chapters. Each chapter is introduced by an illustration of apple blossoms. The title is blind-debossed on the cover without ink and set against a gray background that resembles concrete, as if the book were encased in a protective shell. The book shifts between the garden as a real, remembered place, where the artist’s childhood and her daughter’s intersect, and the garden as a bubble: the guarded territory that parents create around their children’s early years.
The photobook brings together analog and digital photographs made from 2019 to the present, exploring the archetype of the “garden of paradise” as a protected space for childhood. Shot primarily on analog cameras, often using a monocle lens, the images use soft focus and low contrast. Scenes of everyday life in gardens and natural landscapes present the environment as an active presence. The work addresses childhood, personal space, and connection to nature, linking the artist’s memory with the viewer’s experience.
The design, layout, and print preparation were done by Eugenia Ignatova
Published by BYRC
The original dummy, consisting of four separate volumes held in a box, each functioning as its own chapter, was developed at book[e]lab
