Books
Family Matters
Gillian Laub
Aperture
September 2021
Aperture
Hardcover
196 pages
9 ½ x 10 ¾ in
Gillian Laub’s photographs of her family from the past twenty years, now collected in one volume, explore the ways society’s biggest questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships.
Family Matters zeroes in on the artist’s family as an example of the way Donald Trump’s knack for sowing discord and division has impacted communities, individuals, and households across the country. As Laub explains, “I began to unpack my relationship to my relatives—which turned out to be much more indicative of my relationship to the outside world than I had ever thought, and the key to exploring questions I had about the effects of wealth, vanity, childhood, aging, fragility, political conflict, religious traditions, and mortality.” These issues became tangible in 2016, when Laub and her parents found themselves on opposing sides of the most divisive presidential election in recent US history; and further exacerbated in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in the wake of a global pandemic and protests in support of Black Lives Matter.
Family Matters reveals Laub’s willingness to confront ideas of privilege and unity, and to expose the fault lines and vulnerabilities of her relatives and herself. Ultimately, Family Matters celebrates the resiliency and power of family—including the family we choose—in the face of divisive rhetoric. In doing so, it holds up a highly personalized mirror to the social and political divides in the United States today.
Southern Rites
Gillian Laub
Damiani
May 2015
Damiani
Hardcover
Cloth cover
160 pages
11.5 x 9.2 x 0.8 inches
Southern Rites is an original and provocative 12-year visual study of one community's struggle to confront longstanding issues of race and equality.
In May 2009, The New York Times Magazine published a photo-essay by Gillian Laub entitled "A Prom Divided," which documented Georgia's Montgomery County High School's racially segregated prom rituals. Laub's photographs ignited a firestorm of national outrage and led the community to finally integrate. One year later, there was newfound hope--a historic campaign to elect the county's first African American sheriff. But the murder of a young black man--portrayed in Laub's earlier prom series--by a white town patriarch reopened old wounds.
Through her intimate portraits and firsthand testimony, Laub reveals in vivid color the horror and humanity of these complex, intertwined narratives. The photographer's inimitable sensibility--it is the essence and emotional truth of the singular person in front of her lens that matters most--ensures that, however elevated the ideas and themes may be, her pictures remain studies of individuals; a chronicle of their courage in the face of injustice, of their suffering and redemption, possessing an unsettling power.
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Testimony
Gillian Laub
Essays by Ariella Azoulay and Raef Zreik
Aperture
Spring 2007
Aperture
Hardcover
96 pages
9.5 x 11.8 x 0.6 inches
Essays by Ariella Azoulay and Raef Zreik
For the past four years, photographer Gillian Laub has worked in Israel and Palestine, producing portraits of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Nablus and other locations in the region. This volume contains 50 of her portraits of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, displaced Lebanese families and Palestinians--each personally affected by the geopolitical context in which they live, and each unveiling one more essential element in the puzzle of peace for the Middle East. In some of Laub's photographs, the traces of conflict are immediately observable--teenage boys without limbs; a young woman enveloped in scar tissue and a burn-recovery suit. Others are seemingly free from the disfigurements of violence. Yet in the interviews that accompany each portrait, a common thread of survival is revealed. Resilience, pride, defiance, vulnerability--and most astonishing of all, optimism--emerge from one statement to the next. Two essays, one by the Palestinian-Israeli civil rights lawyer Raef Zreik, and one by the distinguished Israeli author Ariella Azoulay, underline the complexity of the work and the dialogue that Laub intends it to spark.
“The bravery of the photos in this series is that they show what even funerals do not show: the true horror of war and terrorism. They do so in a way that does not seek to turn the young people portrayed into types or leech them of their beliefs or prejudices -- of their human specificity, in other words. To consider them is to be reminded not just of human cruelty and human stupidity but also of human tenacity. I can't go on, I'll go on. The words are Samuel Beckett's, but the wisdom they reflect is the common wisdom of everyone portrayed here, whatever else divides them.” –David Rieff, The New York Times
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