Candela Books is looking for photography by artists whose work features their own family for inclusion in a hardcover book to be released in November 2023.

Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir, featuring the artist’s daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother as a single protean character (or multiple characters?) vibrating in time, navigating the mysteries and menace of a shared ancestral forest. This deeply personal photographic sequence is part visual narrative of family myths and part origin story. Pine Tree Ballads is fueled by both truth and imagination, which, in many instances are the fundamental ingredients of our personal history. The “docu-literary” structure of this monograph celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. At the surface, this project explores the emotive, contextual, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore.

Visual storytelling is an art form unto itself. It can entertain us with fictional narrative, impart wisdom through documentation, or provide an escape just as literature does. This power of the narrative is immense. Opening November 4th, Candela Books + Gallery announces Chasing Tales, a group exhibition featuring photographic work by Daniel Coburn, Paul Thulin, and collaborators Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley, all artists connecting the past and present fusing elements of reality with mysterious and imaginative intent.

Candela Books + Gallery is currently seeking photographs made by photographers photographing their own families for our next book project.