Eleonora Agostini’s first photobook takes waitressing as both its literal subject and its organizing metaphor. Working in and around the restaurant — the stage where service is performed for an audience, and the backstage where that performance is prepared — Agostini examines the gestures, postures, objects, and visual codes of the service industry as a way of thinking about gender behaviour, societal expectation, labour, representation, and the gaze. The fictionalized figure of the “waitressing woman” is the work’s central concern, and the book’s scrutiny moves between the visible and hidden sides of that identity, treating the restaurant as a microcosm in which the body negotiates between being observed and observing.
Anchoring the project is Agostini’s mother, whose movements and demeanour provide the recurring focal point. Through her, the photographs extend outward from the professional role to the wider social roles performed in daily life, and to the passage between public and private, vulnerability and strength. The theatricality of ordinary service — the way mundane actions become staged for others — becomes a means of reflecting on labour as it intersects with personal life, and on the relationship between a mother and a daughter.
The book is edited by Tommaso Parrillo, with graphic design by Massimiliano Pace and a text by Joanna Walsh. That combination of editorial, design, and written contributions gives the sequence a considered architecture rather than a loose gathering of images. Published by Witty Books in November 2024 as a 168-page soft cover volume, A Study on Waitressing was named the winner of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award and shortlisted for the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards.
For collectors, the interest lies in a body of work that treats a familiar form of labour as a serious occasion for photography about performance, gender, and the relations between people. Agostini’s approach is conceptual without being cold, and personal without becoming merely anecdotal; the book’s own history suggests it has been read as a significant first statement rather than a debut to be overlooked.
