A selection of portraits by American visual artist Brooke DiDonato invites the viewer to contemplate the hidden self and explore the strangeness of contemporary life.

Born in Ohio and now working in New York, DiDonato builds compositions that tend towards disorientation and the surreal. DiDonato's minimal aesthetic poses the human form provocatively against natural and architectural forms. Extreme landscapes—corn fields and cacti, a drainage pipe and a lonely desert—as well as domestic spaces, stand in for the subconscious mind. The pictures become fantastic as environments hide or subsume the human figures. Flowers bloom; faces disappear.

DiDonato's pictures are haunting and cinematic. The lightness of her preferred pastel color palette, inspired by 1950s post-war suburbia, lends a softness to this collection, and offers a counterpoint to the strain on the human bodies (mainly female) that bend, stretch and turn away from her camera lens.

Published by Draw Down
Series Thirty-Two 
First edition, 2018

32 pages, full color, 6.5 × 9.35 inches