In 1989, Eliot Porter gave Janet Russek a monorail camera, a gift too unwieldy for anything but studio work. In 1993 she set up still lifes for the first time, beginning with ripe squashes, peaches and pears photographed in natural light alone, their rounded forms alluding to the fullness of pregnancy. The project then widened to vegetables and roots whose tendrils reach for the sun, maturing plants moving toward decomposition, pregnant women photographed at close range until bellies and breasts become almost abstract, dolls that touch the darker psychology of childhood and parenting, and significant personal objects that harken to the past. Seed, stem, decay: the title names the arc that holds the volume together.
Radius Books gathers this long-term body of work into a single hardcover of 224 pages and 66 images. MaLin Wilson-Powell, an art scholar and critic, contributes an essay on Russek’s creative process, an essay that runs alongside photographs rather than standing in for them, addressing the thinking behind a project that unfolded over years.
Russek’s working context is unusual. In 1980 she and her husband, David Scheinbaum, founded Scheinbaum and Russek, Ltd., the photography dealership in Santa Fe. She has always worked with 4 x 5 cameras, and the studio discipline shaped by that format gives the close-range photographs their particular directness: bodies, fruit and objects are treated with the same attentiveness, none turned into spectacle.
The book’s claim on a collector’s attention lies in its coherence. As a retrospective, it gathers disparate series into a single volume whose title’s metaphor — tenderness, fragility, growth and decline, all carried on a stem — is enacted across the pages. Pregnancy, ripe fruit, dolls, memory objects: each series is a different register of the same question, and the accumulated effect is of a photographer returning to the same concerns from different directions over many years. The essay provides the vocabulary for that process; the sequence provides the argument. For a collection oriented toward long-form photographic projects, it records a sustained and purposeful body of work.
