In Focus: Photobooks by Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Sarah Mei Herman, Zoe Hamill and Emma O’Brien

The latest finds from our community artists’ photobooks

“In Focus” is a quarterly series of reviews in which we hunt down and peruse the worthy publications off the shelves of our community artists. Each month, Der Greif is selecting a set of photobooks from our talents’ pool. Compiled here are the most recent releases from our community artists Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Sarah Mei Herman, Zoe Hamill and Emma O’Brien.

In “A Factless Autobiography”, Debmalya Ray Choudhuri’s use of a black-and-white, high-grain visual style is central to the emotional weight and conceptual ambiguity of the work. The grainy, noisy texture of the images evokes memories barely held together, or of psychic residue lingering after trauma. It’s a language of fragmentation and opacity, where clarity is deliberately obscured. Faces blur, spaces dissolve, and temporal markers collapse, making it difficult to distinguish between dream, memory, and reality. This aesthetic choice mirrors the disorienting experience of grief and the nonlinear nature of healing. It also gestures toward the idea of anonymity – not just of subjects, but of the self. Choudhuri’s autobiographical project resists the traditional documentary impulse toward clarity or truth. Instead, he crafts a visual field where meaning flickers, almost like a signal struggling to come through. By withholding visual legibility, the work invites introspection. It insists the viewer sit with discomfort, with the unknowability of another’s pain – and perhaps even their own. This refusal of visual certainty becomes an act of care, a way of holding space for trauma without spectacle. The black-and-white noise becomes not just a formal device, but an ethics of looking.

“Julian & Jonathan” by Sarah Mei Herman is a delicate photographic study of brotherhood, intimacy, and adolescence. The series follows her half brother and father over several years, documenting their evolving relationship through quiet, emotionally charged moments. Herman’s work is known for its sensitivity to the unspoken – gestures, silences, and physical proximity become tools for exploring the subtleties of closeness and change. Shot in natural light with a restrained, contemplative style, the images capture both vulnerability and strength. Rather than overt drama, Herman leans into stillness and intimacy, offering a slow-burning narrative that invites reflection. This book continues Herman’s broader practice of exploring transitional states and the bonds that define us. It’s a thoughtful, poetic contribution to contemporary portrait photography, resonating with anyone drawn to the quiet complexities of human connection.

“Fantasy Island”, published by Rotten Books, is a poetic and quietly collective publication featuring works by Greif Alumni Emma O’Brien and Zoe Hamill among other Irish photographers from the last fifty years. Both artists’ works delve into ideas of place, memory, and identity – using the camera to question what is real, imagined, or inherited. While their approaches differ, their work converges beautifully within the book’s dreamlike sequence, where landscape and portraiture blend into a shared psychological terrain. O’Brien’s photographs often feel cinematic, capturing fleeting gestures, half-lit interiors, and moments of pause. Her images evoke a sense of longing or displacement, as though the people and places she depicts are on the verge of dissolving. Hamill, by contrast, brings a tactile, forensic sensitivity to landscape and objects – inviting viewers to read textures, scars, and silences as stand-ins for personal or collective histories. “Fantasy Island” constructs an ‘island’ not grounded in geography, but in sensibility – where the familiar becomes strange and vice versa. The book avoids overt narratives, instead creating space for ambiguity and resonance. It’s a subtle, emotionally intelligent publication that rewards slow looking.