Her Own, Dragana Jurišić’s 2023 photobook from RRB PhotoBooks, opens where certainty ends. The photographer’s aunt Gordana left rural Yugoslavia in the 1950s, then moved through a world of assumed names and suspected espionage. But Jurišić does not attempt a settled portrait. Instead she treats the act of recovery as her subject—an effort to summon a person from fragments, guesswork, and the pressure of family memory.

The book, a first edition of 128 pages, is structured as a sequence of illustrated notebooks. That form allows research, recollection, and visual invention to coexist without reconciliation. It recalls the interleaving of memoir and history in W. G. Sebald, yet its pulse is intimate, rooted in a niece’s persistent questioning. The notebook becomes an archive where uncertainty is examined, not smoothed over.

Jurišić places Gordana’s story beside two others: her own, and that of L’Inconnue de la Seine, the unidentified woman whose death mask became a durable cultural icon. Across these three lives, the work turns on trauma, resilience, survival, and the ways women are fictionalized, turned into victims, and pushed to the margins of larger and smaller histories. What emerges is a question about authorship itself—who may tell a woman’s story, and what remains when that story refuses to be legible.

For the serious collector, Her Own earns attention not by solving Gordana’s riddle but by giving formal shape to the ethical and emotional labour of chasing it. The notebook structure, the refusal of closure, and the triangulation of three women make it an artist’s book where documentary and subjective reflection are inseparable. Published as a first edition in 2023, it stands as a quiet counterpoint to the definitive monograph—a work that keeps its doubt, and its longing, visible on every page.