In Focus: “Someday I will lose you” by Minh-An Pham and “My Mother’s Tender Script” by Asiya Al. Sharabi

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, the focus is on “Someday I will lose you” by Minh-An Pham and “My Mother’s Tender Script” by Asiya Al. Sharabi. Both artists turn to ordinary evidence to explore maternal bonds and figures: Pham examines the mundane gestures and domestic rituals captured during his returns home, while Al. Sharabi reworks the handwritten notes, photographs and everyday objects preserved inside her late mother’s handbag.

In 2017, at the age of fifteen, Minh-An Pham left Vietnam to study in Australia, without imagining that what felt like a temporary departure would eventually become almost a decade of living away from his family. In “Someday I will lose you,” the artist confronts the realization that a short-term arrangement had gradually become his new reality: a decision he approached with the lightheartedness of youth and little thought for the future.

The photographs form an album of the artist’s returns home. His mother arranges flowers in a vase; her nails soak in a bowl of water; an outdoor table is laid beneath a pink, lace-like cloth gently lifted by the wind. The images dwell on fragments of domestic life – small, seemingly inconsequential gestures that nevertheless reveal aspects of a world that continues to exist without the artist. Nostalgia underpins the work: for his family, for the place in which he grew up, and for a version of himself that no longer exists.

Self-published and handmade, the format of the book draws on the Asian calendar. Pham prints the photographs on rice paper and stacks them beneath a pink bar screwed directly into the wall. At first glance, its material recalls the soft, glossy, padded PVC covers of childhood diaries and stationery. Yet this softness is deceptive. To the touch, the bar is hard, made from vitreous enamel: a glass-like coating produced by fusing powdered glass onto metal.

This tension between appearance and substance runs throughout the whole series. Familiar symbols of childhood are tinged with subtle hints of discomfort: a life-size toy horse slightly too small to comfortably hold an adult; the artist resting his head on his mother’s lap, his back turned to the viewer; a burning dollhouse. Side by side, these images suggest a longing for the security of childhood, alongside the knowledge that it cannot be recovered.

Someday I will lose you speaks to a reckoning familiar to many who leave home: the moment when parents come into view as people in their own right, with desires and vulnerabilities of their own. For Pham, separation brought a clearer understanding of what home and his mother meant to him. In this sense, the work reads as a letter of gratitude to his mother: the woman who sacrificed so much to raise two children alone. Through the photographs, the artist clings to his experience of being his mother’s child, knowing, as the title suggests, that it is a version of himself he will one day have to let go of. The series is an act of preservation, shadowed by the recognition that love cannot exist without pain: prematurely mourning an inevitable future, transforming the ordinary into a record of what will one day be gone.

In Asiya Al. Sharabi’s “My Mother’s Tender Script,” the ordinary is seen through a renewed lens. Following her mother’s death, the familiar contents of her handbag—folded papers, photographs, documents, drawings and an address book—are revisited through alternative photographic processes, repeatedly reworking the same portrait of her mother. Through its various iterations, the artist reconstructs a compelling image of a woman whose life was deeply constrained by the circumstances of her time, yet who continually sought forms of independence and self-determination.

As a Yemeni woman, Al. Sharabi’s mother never had the opportunity to study. Although her father strongly believed in girls’ education, he died while she was still young. Like many women of her generation, she was married at eleven; by fifteen, she was widowed and already the mother of two children. When she later married Al Sharabi’s father, a highly educated writer and journalist, she began developing her own learning systems to bridge the gap between their worlds.

One of these was through her small address book, which she carried everywhere. Whenever she met someone new, she would ask them to write down their name and telephone number on whatever was at hand: scraps of paper, napkins, folded notes. At home, she carefully transferred this information into the book, repeating names and numbers until she had them memorised.

Published by Workshop Arts in May 2026, “My Mother’s Tender Script” is a collection of iterative portraits merging photography and text. Using the Resinotype process, inspired by Alphonse Poitevin’s 19th-century photographic experiments, Al Sharabi transforms the photograph into an enlarged digital negative and hand-coats watercolour paper with light-sensitive gelatin.

Inspired by both Andy Warhol’s repeated portraits of Marilyn Monroe and her mother’s own practice of rewriting words until memorisation, the artist uses repetition to mirror the process through which her mother accumulated knowledge. The resulting portraits move beyond representation. Enhanced by fragments of drawings and handwritten notes, each iteration bears witness to how her mother moved through life, restoring a powerful trace of her resilience to her image.

Explore more of our community photobooks here. Read Séverine Sajous’ Artist Feature on motherhood, intergenerational care, and chosen family beyond blood ties. Also check out our first Spread the Dialogue: Maryam Touzani & Mauro Macchioni in conversation with Caroline von Courten on family, care and the vital importance of memory.