Book of the Week: Selected by Odette England

Book Review I Made Them Run Away Photographs by Martina Zanin Reviewed by Odette England "Zanin’s book presents a bizarre love triangle. There are photographs made by Zanin mixed with family snapshots. Stitched into the book are smaller slips of peach-colored paper, the same color as the cover. Each features text in typewriter font, authored by Zanin’s mother and taken from her diary called Letters to a Man I Have Never Had. The third arm of the triangle — “the man” — is mostly invisible..."

I Made Them Run Away by Martina Zanin.

I Made Them Run Away
Photographs by Martina Zanin

Skinnerboox, Jesi, Italy, 2021. 132 pp., 6½x9¼".

Did you read her book?
Yes, I read it.

It’s common in language, a word spelled the same that differs in pronunciation. With a word like ‘read’, it also refers to different tenses. They’re called heteronyms, words that change their meaning depending on where the stress is placed. It’s this thought I have upon reading Martina Zanin’s photobook I Made Them Run Away. At first, because the folded softcover features a long tear. Tear as in air, not tear as in fear. Which takes me on a tangent to the Australian rock band INXS’ hits Never Tear Us Apart (1987) and Bitter Tears (1990). Context tells us which tear is the right one.

Zanin’s book presents a bizarre love triangle. There are photographs made by Zanin mixed with family snapshots. Stitched into the book are smaller slips of peach-colored paper, the same color as the cover. Each features text in typewriter font, authored by Zanin’s mother and taken from her diary called Letters to a Man I Have Never Had. The third arm of the triangle — “the man” — is mostly invisible. (Come to think of it, ‘Bermuda Love Triangle’ may be more accurate. After all, all stories contain myth. If they’re good stories — like Zanin’s — they keep us in suspense with complex supporting characters, subplots, and implications).

It’s easy to tell the snapshots from more recent photographs, but there is visual coherence across the two type of images. It’s as if the newer ones were left in Zanin’s back pocket and washed too many times. They are diaphanous and diluted. This is a strength. It works because there is a lot of skin in Zanin’s pictures. Bodies at oblique angles, orifices (lips, holes, slits, vents), creases, seepage, and stickiness. Appendages and objects pulled, tucked, bent, trapped, purged, and poked. Many images are taken at close range where you can see skin prickles, a protruding throbbing vein, damp glans, and hair knots. Some subjects recur such as birds, bathroom mirrors, and palm trees. These images seem more metaphorical and act like haptic feedback devices. I feel the feathers, condensation, and fronds.

Many of the newer photographs lack specificity of place. Backgrounds are lean and hygienic. It’s this curt scientific façade that feels at odds with the proximity of the subjects. Cool and distant with excruciating familiarity. I’m careful to choose the word ‘familiarity’ over ‘intimacy’ because the relationships lack warmth. They refer to connection, yes, and tenderness too but also unease. It feels more like a book about looking over one’s shoulder than it does of looking back. These are the devil-in-the-detail pictures, like the budgerigar clinging to its wire cage with its beak, paired with an image taken inside a car of a seatbelt clutched by an anxious fist. The torn snapshots offer visceral gratification too. Each a swift micro-violence that beheads some male figures while removing others. It’s like photographic voodoo.

Zanin’s mother writes with an infatuated pen. Her private thoughts, presumably never meant for public view, drench the reader in wishes (“I would like someone who loves me sincerely and holds me tight”) and then reality (“there are times like these when I remember why I decided not to become involved with anyone anymore”). The intent and audience for her words changes throughout the book. Sometimes she’s giving herself advice, some read as affirmations. Others come across as directives to “the man”. Several present as cautions to other women including her daughter.

There are two photobooks, both by women, that remind me of I Made Them Run Away. Nikki S. Lee’s Parts (Hatje Cantz, 2005) and Chino Otsuka’s Imagine Finding Me (TRACE Editions, 2006). With the former, men are partially sliced out of images, as if after a breakup. In the words of the publisher, “These halved images clearly and disturbingly point out the empty spots, the striking dependencies and the ways that we all-women particularly-define ourselves through our partners”. The latter is a series of unique double self-portraits based on childhood snapshots taken from Otskua’s family album. Otsuka creates a digital time machine to bring her current and former self together in a single image.

I thought a lot about the title Zanin’s mother gave her diary, Letters to a Man I Have Never Had. To have and hold from this day forward. Who — and what — do we ever really have? It reminds me of that teenage drinking game Never Have I Ever. A great game for getting to know people. A sure-fire way to lose a man you’ve never had.

Zanin’s book reflects the undertow of a girl who wanted to be loved like the man her mother yearned for. It is a beautiful and sad braid of tales because it teeters between reflecting on one’s upbringing with a mix of fondness and ferocity. Making and presenting images that look and feel like still lives, taken by a medical examiner channeling Elinor Carucci, Ishiuchi Miyako, and the sensations (not the aesthetics) embedded in Antoine D’Agata’s photographs, is persuasive. It’s also a photobook that makes sense in book form. It harks back to the size and feel of a diary. And a body, too.

Did I read Zanin’s book? Yes, I read it. I Made Them Run Away reconsiders how we picture and puncture family (and partake in it photographically). How we narrate autobiographical memory through mixed messages. How opposites attract and repel. And, how as we mature and grow, stressors within our blood relationships can wither, bloom, or ignite the need to tear it down and build it back up again.

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Odette England is a photographer and writer based in Providence, Rhode Island and New York. Her work has been shown in more than 100 museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces worldwide. She has two photobooks out this year: Dairy Character, winner of the 2021 Light Work Book Award; and Past Paper Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, which received a $5,000 Rauschenberg Publication Grant.