It's here! It's here!

In the September 8, 2024 Thoughts-letter, I wrote:

My younger daughter, Daniela, won a residency with the Penumbra Foundation to create a photographic art book that will add to her ongoing exploration of family memory. The book will counterpose elements of my mother’s FBI file with photographs and documents from our family archive, which she is curating.

This book, Security Matter - C, is a work of art and memory. Using pages from Mom’s FBI file and photographs and documents from the extraordinary family archive she is creating, Daniela juxtaposes the FBI’s portrait of Mom as a security risk (the left-hand pages), with Mom as mother, wife, comrade, sister, and friend (the right-hand pages): the FBI’s demon-haunted world vs. flesh-and-blood human beings. The two sets of pages don’t touch because they have nothing in common, like matter and antimatter.

This book is also Daniela’s way of asserting the memory of her grandmother against those who would control the narrative by turning her grandmother into a wraith. Her grandmother was a revolutionary, a working-class, radical, anti-racist feminist who loved people and wanted a better world for everyone.

The book is out! And it’s red (of course).

Daniela worked with book designer Hemza Hajyousif to translate her artistic vision into “flesh and blood.” She created each of the 100 books by hand — every stitch, every cut, every print, every fold.

Of the 100 books, only 20 remain, so visit her site to get yours.