Inside Brooke DiDonato’s surreal, uncanny pictures

How do you create a picture that feels each acquainted and unsettling? This is the realm of American visible artist and photographer Brooke DiDonato, whose new picture ebook, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer, shall be launched on 29 January 2026. The monograph brings collectively DiDonato’s surreal work in a set that blends nostalgia, humour and unease.

This is DiDonato’s most complete assortment thus far, that includes her best-known collection – together with A House Is Not a Home – alongside new work showing in print for the primary time. The ebook additionally contains an introduction by author Eleanor Sutherland and a dialog between Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and author Eve Van Dyke and DiDonato’s father, Bob DiDonato.

The pictures are rooted in home life – depicting white-picket-fenced houses and different suburban environments in Ohio and past – however are distorted into the fantastical. Human our bodies seem in on a regular basis contexts – on sidewalks, in cornfields and deserts – however in surprising, even unimaginable, methods. They’re contorted into uncanny positions – limbs bent throughout sofas, climbing into attics and rising from unlikely locations.

A pair of legs cling from a window, flowers bloom from armchairs and bathroom bowls, and foliage crawls from beds and phone receivers. A head squeezes right into a dollhouse and our bodies fold into a hearth, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and slot between the crockery in a kitchen cupboard.

The pictures evoke dreamlike disorientation: we recognise the world, but it surely feels off-kilter. DiDonato’s imagery remembers Freud’s idea of the uncanny, the place the acquainted turns into eerie by way of distortion. The images seize emotions which can be troublesome to articulate – like forgetting a face, or a once-familiar place changing into unusual over time.

A defining aspect of DiDonato’s work is the playful, provocative titles she assigns to her images. Names resembling Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy however I’m Still in My Patterns trace at modern-day anxieties; her work is infused with darkish comedy and self-awareness, including a component of emotional reality. Each picture turns into a personal joke shared with the viewer.

What in regards to the title of the monograph itself? While Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer remembers the playground taunt, it additionally echoes the custom of vanitas portray – still-life works in style in Europe in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries depicting skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, hourglasses and decaying fruit as reminders of life’s transience. DiDonato’s work equally balances life and demise, humour and tragedy, intimacy and alienation.