The Art of Living Twice returns to a life measured in one place. Simen K. Lambrecht photographs the memory of his grandmother Cécile, who spent all eighty-two years of her life in the same small Flemish village — the fields, the winding roads, the rituals and habits he once wanted only to escape. Published by Éditions La Cab in 2025, the book gathers 124 pages of photographs alongside reproductions of letters she wrote before her terminal diagnosis. Those letters gave Lambrecht a way to reread the landscape he had dismissed as a teenager; the pictures answer them.
What distinguishes the project is how openly it admits memory’s failures. Lambrecht does not treat the photograph as a reliable document. The images move between what survives of Cécile, his own childhood fantasies, and the rural stereotypes that accumulate around any village remembered from a distance. Each frame holds the tension between relic and requiem, and the sequence as a whole proposes a kind of shared utopia in which grandmother and grandson remain, however partially, present to one another.
The physical book is unusually deliberate. At 24 by 29 centimetres, with Swiss binding and a hardcover debossed on velvet fabric, it invites handling as much as looking; the design is by Emma Corbique, printed on Magno Volume 150 g/m² stock, with texts in French and English. The tactile cover and open Swiss binding make the volume a physical encounter with the material, while the photographs and correspondence connect the act of looking to the slower work of remembering.
The project was named one of ten equal winners of the 2026 Fotobus Library Award. That recognition matters less as a laurel than as confirmation that this is a book about how photographs behave when they are asked to carry grief. For a collector, the interest lies precisely there: in a book by a photographer working at the meeting point of documentary and elegy, made with the care such an inquiry deserves.
