Daughter and noted poet combine her photography and his short verse.
This book contains forty examples of Laura Matthias Bendoly’s recent photographs, along with an introduction explaining the history of her engagement with the art and some elucidating notes adjacent to the photographs themselves. As the book was in progress, she asked her father, the poet John Matthias, if he would like to contribute a few short poems to enter into dialogue with her images. This he has done, producing some work quite untypical of poetry in his recent books, but compatible with the photographs he has chosen to write for. (For, rather than necessarily about.)
This collaboration between father and daughter invokes an even closer and necessarily more complex set of engagements over time without naming them or trying to give them shape or contour. Two lives are implicitly at work here, whose magical endurance is inherently consoling and redemptive.--Michael Anania
Photography. Art. Poetry.