Small Death collects photographs made by the artist Martha Naranjo Sandoval over
her first years living in New York after emigrating from Mexico City. Shaped
around Naranjo Sandoval’s original contact sheets and film reels, it comprises
an artist’s book unfolding in tactile and iterative form. Sandoval’s work moves
between streetscapes, nude self-portraits, compositions of found forms, and
tender photographs of her family, all suffused with a sensitivity to the ways in
which the artist’s surroundings, loved ones, and home continuously shape her
sense of self and belonging. The artist’s husband, parents, and siblings are
pictured in their homes as well as in more dislocating rural and urban
landscapes between the US and Mexico, tracing a continuum between displacement
and rootedness. Meanwhile close-up self-portraits, interspersed throughout, act
as registers of the determined introspection that anchors this powerful
exploration of the image sequence and book form as means of physical and sensual
expression.
