Abdulhamid Kircher’s Rotting from Within begins with a return. At seventeen, he reencountered his estranged father, recently released from incarceration for selling drugs and attempted murder. Photography became the instrument of that reacquaintance — a way of drawing close to a man and to a Turkish culture and heritage from which distance had been the norm. The title names a feeling Kircher described upon unearthing his father’s history: the discovery of generational trauma within the patriarchs of his family, and the subsequent task of uncovering his own self among the things passed down. Born in Berlin to German and Turkish parents, he immigrated with his mother to the United States at the age of eight.
Published by Loose Joints in June 2024, the book runs 224 pages with 333 plates, gathering portraiture, observation, archival documents, diaries and more into complex assemblages and visual webs of association. Its structure refuses the single authoritative image; speculation and reality are left to rub against one another, and even those closest at hand remain partly unknowable. Across this sequencing, Kircher tests the myths of masculinity, the glorification of violence, and the question of how we do not get to choose the life into which we are born.
A text by the artist and Zoe Bullock accompanies the plates, with Sarah Chaplin Espenon editing at Loose Joints alongside Kircher and Bullock; the book was designed and published by Loose Joints. The section-sewn, debossed OTA-bound silkscreened softcover — 210 × 290 mm, carrying the code LJ200 — gives the work an objecthood suited to its archival cast.
For collectors, the book matters for its method: a diaristic project that treats identity, patriarchy, trauma and reconciliation as problems to be worked through photographically rather than resolved. It won the Un/Fund Award in 2023 and was nominated for the First Photobook category at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards in 2024; a solo exhibition of Rotting from Within was held at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, from 29 June to 31 August 2024. Kircher’s threaded visual voice speaks at the intersection of an internal monologue and a nuanced approach to documentary — reason enough to keep the book within reach, and to watch where he goes next.
