In Focus: “Probable Cause” by Henri Airo and “Tua Sorella” by Veronica Barbato

The latest photobook picks by Der Greif

“In Focus” is Der Greif’s photobook review series, spotlighting our picks from the current open call for submissions and our community artists' publications. This month, we write about “Probable Cause” by Henri Airo and “Tua Sorella” by Veronica Barbato.

Personally, I found writing about these books challenging because the most obvious link between the works — the passing of a sibling — feels somewhat like a reductive prompt for the feature. Reductive of the two young women and their memory, of their families, and of the artists themselves; their sensibility and practice.

Though it was the idea of grief that first paired these two works in my mind, I have since grown more interested in what sets them apart. Faced with a similar rupture in their lives, Airo and Barbato go on to create works with entirely different approaches, and it’s within that difference that I’d like to ground this piece.

From investigation to resurrection, “Probable Cause” and “Tua Sorella” are not two examples of similar work but two ends of a spectrum; Airo using the book as a record, and Barbato as a shrine. And, like everything this spectrum holds in between, these works are just as complex, resisting the kind of categorisation that comparing them may impose.

In “Probable Cause,” Henri Airo reconstructs the day his sister was killed from the perspective of the man responsible. Struck at a Helsinki crosswalk in January 2012 by a repeat drunk driver in a hit-and-run, she was just eleven years old.

When Airo came across the original police reports in 2018, he realised how the media had instrumentalised the case to fit a rage-fostering narrative that never cared to expand on the social circumstances of addiction in Finnish society. He found himself feeling what the media’s portrait had denied him before: compassion for the then 25-year-old metalsmith and father of two who, already long struggling with alcoholism, was responsible for his sister’s death.

Published by Kult Books, with design by Camilla Marrese, Henri Airo, and Janne Riikonen, “Probable Cause” pieces together witnesses' statements through archival research and photographic re-enactment to unpick that distortion – the media’s flattening of tragedy into sterile spectacle, designed to agitate the audience while steering it clear of any structural awareness.

“I am recreating scenes from the report,” he writes, “to construct a visual representation of a side of the story that I feel was left out of this discussion”.

The words come from an email Airo sent in 2020, whose transcript opens the book. They let us in on the core of the work and his intentions: he is asking a redacted recipient for permission to use his workshop to restage and photograph a series of scenes from the case.

Some of the photographs are reimagined from the smallest details in the testimonies. Drunk and on his way home, the man had stopped at McDonald’s. In one image, a handful of coins on a blue work overall recalls his interaction with the drive-through worker, who later described him as so drunk that he let the receipt and change drop into his lap. Near the beginning of the book, an image of fries covered in pieces of glass belongs to the other side of the crash, the moment his wife, unpacking the food he had brought home, found it scattered with the remnants of his smashed windshield.

The sequence isn’t linear; instead, the book is paced by the alternation of testimony transcripts, police exhibits, and Airo’s own staged photographs, made with the help of both original witnesses and actors. Arranged like scattered clues, each photograph carries a timestamp that drifts across the bottom of the page, its position tracking the moment depicted. Throughout the book, smaller pages peek from the fold and sit in the lower half of the spread. They serve as a sort of voice-over, holding Airo’s own reflections on the process and his own reckoning.

The book closes with a section titled Research Material, laid over gridded paper and built from newspaper clippings, forum screenshots, and Airo’s notes in red pen. Consistently, throughout the section, the word “accident” is crossed out. The gesture underpins Airo’s disdain for the term, a word that files under natural forces what was in fact a man driving home drunk, convicted six times in ten years before he finally killed someone. For him, the word carries a social attitude, a way, in Finnish society, of treating addiction as a private choice rather than a failure of the community.

Like “Probable Cause,” “Tua Sorella” too begins with a found document. Veronica Barbato was twelve when her sister Mary took her own life at twenty-three after a short period of addiction and depression. Five years later, Barbato’s best friend handed her a letter signed “Tua Sorella” (“Your Sister”) with little explanation. A medium, client at the friend’s salon, had seen Barbato in a group photo and insisted she had a message to pass on from her sister. Reading it, Barbato immediately recognised Mary’s way of phrasing, and the flower drawn beside the signature, the last tattoo Mary had given herself, at home, on her knee.

The letter shook Barbato, who says it saved her. Mary was eleven when Veronica was born and more or less raised her, and her words had always been gospel. “I believe in my sister”, Barbato would reply when asked whether she believed in God at all. Mary paid for her dance lessons and introduced her to poetry, music, and art. “She used her fragility to educate me”, explains Barbato, recalling how Mary would inject in front of her and then make her pinky swear to never do it herself. She has never even smoked a cigarette. The letter arrived around the moment Barbato decided she wanted to try ecstasy, the one drug Mary had never asked her to swear off.

The book runs completely full bleed, alternating archival images with Mary's diary entries. Barbato took most of those photographs herself, as a child, because Mary asked her to. She understood only much later that Mary, knowing what she intended to do, was assembling documentation to leave behind for her son, Christopher. The manipulation only came later, to show reality unpolished: to, in Barbato’s words, “ruin her sister’s life exactly how it happened”. The bright, neon colours and glitters, which give the book an almost psychedelic feel, reflect the false illusion of drugs and hint at the dimension of street art.

The idea at the heart of graffiti and street art has always been close to Barbato: the chance to share art with everyone, even those who cannot buy it. “Tua Sorella,” in fact, started in the street, where Barbato would paste images of Mary onto building walls and share her story through the most disparate mediums, from merch to stickers. These choices grew out of her initial reluctance to think of the work as an art project at all, and her insistence on it as a mission.

Co-published by Artphilein Editions and 89books and designed by Vittoria Fragapane and Barbato herself, the book becomes another vehicle of that same mission: to make Mary seen. In the book, Mary’s head, cut out and pasted onto a prayer card reading “Mary Holy protector of love and transgression,” turns her into a saint and speaks to what Barbato calls a “life of glistening”: the story of a family that stayed close despite tragedy, bound together by love.

The cover, a close-up portrait of Mary split across front and back, is wrapped in a plastic jacket whose front carries Mary’s stencil cutout. Barbato chose this image, of Mary in juvenile detention, after noticing that she, Mary, and their third sister all share the same stance, sealing the book in a love pact between them.

In this sense, both books read as a kind of pact to me. Of all the themes “Probable Cause” and “Tua Sorella” share, what strikes me most is the concept of refusal – not of death itself, but of the generalisations that may come with it. Airo refuses the convenience of calling his sister’s death an “accident, whereas Barbato refuses invisibility, pasting her sister onto walls and prayer cards until Mary, who died feeling unseen, cannot be missed. This, perhaps, is what a record and a shrine share after all: both are arguments against forgetting, or remembering too simply.

Explore more of our community photobooks here. Browse our recent »Guest Room: Auronda Scalera & Alfredo Cramerotti« to discover images that capture moments of sudden life rupture, displacement, and emotional estrangement and explore how emotional distance between a father and child widens prior to his death through Emilija Kosić’s Artist Feature.