Things Change Anyway brings together photographs made by MC Coble and Louise Wolthers over a decade of shared life. Gender affirmation, menopause, domestic encounters and the natural world enter the same visual field. Rather than organise these experiences as a chronological record, the collaborators build connections across them. The book asks how a photograph can acknowledge a changing body without reducing that body to evidence of a single transition.
Both artists contribute photographs. Coble, whose practice includes performance, adds twelve drawings; Wolthers, an art and photography historian, contributes five essays. These different forms extend the intimate archive into an inquiry about representation. The drawings address experiences including depression, pandemic isolation and waiting for gender-affirming care. The essays connect particular images with photographic history and queer and trans theory. Their coexistence gives the reader several ways to approach the same concerns, through bodily experience, visual association and sustained argument.
The publisher’s spreads make that movement tangible: a text about blood shares a spread with a close view of skin, while elsewhere plants, food and everyday objects enter the sequence. These are not illustrations added to an already complete thesis. Their placement invites the reader to discover relations between private experience and the surrounding world. Designed by Coble and Wolthers with support from Tina Enghoff, the 192-page softcover was printed in 2023 and co-published by Breadfield Press and forlaget *[asterisk].
Awarded the Swedish Photobook Prize in 2024, the book offers collectors a substantial example of collaborative photographic autobiography. Its interest lies in how two people share authorship while retaining different modes of expression, and how a domestic archive becomes a form of critical thought. The physical sequence matters: returning from an essay to a photograph changes the terms of looking, allowing identity, ageing and kinship to remain open questions rather than settled labels.
