During Melbourne’s sixth lockdown, Andrew Rovenko and his family turned a child’s fascination with the night sky into a reason to explore their immediate surroundings. A homemade space helmet and suit supplied the starting point; shared stories gave the outings a life beyond the novelty of dressing up. The Rocketgirl Chronicles follows his daughter as a small astronaut in an ordinary neighbourhood, making the limits of pandemic life the setting for an imagined journey.

Rovenko photographed the project on medium-format film. The book gathers more than a hundred scenes, while the artist’s account recalls finding stories in places as modest as a bedroom, a bus stop or a laundry. The costume creates a productive mismatch between the child and her surroundings: familiar infrastructure can be read as an unfamiliar landscape. In one published preview spread, a photograph of the astronaut in a shopping trolley sits opposite a petrol pump. Their pairing invites a playful reading of transport and refuelling without requiring an actual departure from the neighbourhood.

This record describes the 172-page hardback issued in October 2023, measuring 23.5 × 29.7 centimetres. The artist’s gallery shows colour photographs set within generous white margins, giving the individual scenes room to register and allowing facing images to establish relationships. Rovenko describes the photographs as memories of time spent exploring and imagining together: the child will outgrow the costume, but the shared experience can remain. That connection between family memory and invented adventure gives the project a significance beyond its immediate lockdown setting.

For collectors, the interest is in this sustained transformation of restricted everyday space into a photographic world, and in the original book’s presentation of that experience. It was among the PhotoBook Open Submission winners selected for Belfast Photo Festival in 2024. The original ISBN, 9780645777475, distinguishes this edition from the later Lannoo publication; the recognition should not erase differences between the two physical books.