How do you create an image that feels both familiar and unsettling? This is the realm of American visual artist and photographer Brooke DiDonato, whose new photo book, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer, will be released on 29 January 2026. The monograph brings together DiDonato’s surreal work in a collection that blends nostalgia, humour and unease.
This is DiDonato’s most comprehensive collection to date, featuring her best-known series – including A House Is Not a Home – alongside new work appearing in print for the first time. The book also includes an introduction by writer Eleanor Sutherland and a conversation between Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and DiDonato’s father, Bob DiDonato.
The images are rooted in domestic life – depicting white-picket-fenced homes and other suburban environments in Ohio and beyond – but are distorted into the fantastical. Human bodies appear in everyday contexts – on sidewalks, in cornfields and deserts – but in unexpected, even impossible, ways. They’re contorted into uncanny positions – limbs bent across sofas, climbing into attics and emerging from unlikely places.
A pair of legs hang from a window, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, and foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse and bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and slot between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet.
The images evoke dreamlike disorientation: we recognise the world, but it feels off-kilter. DiDonato’s imagery recalls Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes eerie through distortion. The photographs capture feelings that are difficult to articulate – like forgetting a face, or a once-familiar place becoming strange over time.
A defining element of DiDonato’s work is the playful, provocative titles she assigns to her photographs. Names such as Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns hint at modern-day anxieties; her work is infused with dark comedy and self-awareness, adding an element of emotional truth. Each image becomes a private joke shared with the viewer.
What about the title of the monograph itself? While Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer recalls the playground taunt, it also echoes the tradition of vanitas painting – still-life works popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries depicting skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, hourglasses and decaying fruit as reminders of life’s transience. DiDonato’s work similarly balances life and death, humour and tragedy, intimacy and alienation.
