Geert Broertjes’s One Year: A Poetic Story About Love, Loss and Grief arose from a concentrated period of bereavement and separation. In a short span, the photographer’s aunt, grandmother, and mother died. His girlfriend, with whom he shared the ensuing grief, became a recurring presence in the photographs; their relationship ended only months after his mother’s death. Published by Schilt Publishing in 2019, the book brings these intertwined experiences into a single autobiographical work.

Broertjes did not begin with a predetermined documentary structure. He photographed instinctively and recognized the coherence of the images only afterward. That retrospective discovery is central to the project: the photographs do not illustrate a settled account of mourning but register a process while its meaning was still uncertain. Family loss and romantic separation remain distinct experiences, yet the book allows them to occupy the same emotional field of attachment, absence, and memory.

The entire series was made on analogue film in black and white. Its direct, unpolished tonal character corresponds to the darkness of the period without turning grief into spectacle. The recurring figure of the girlfriend gives the work an intimate human axis, while the circumstances surrounding the pictures complicate her presence: she is at once companion, subject, and part of what will be lost. The result is personal photography shaped less by explanation than by the coherence that accumulated across repeated acts of looking.

For a photobook collection, One Year merits attention as a focused example of autobiographical image-making in which method and subject cannot be separated. Its significance does not depend on claims of rarity or status, but on the way an instinctively produced group of analogue photographs was subsequently formed into a sustained account of bereavement. Collectors concerned with personal documentary practice, black-and-white photography, and the translation of private experience into book form will find a work whose restraint is inseparable from its emotional force.