Published in 2010 by SteidlMACK, Martina Hoogland Ivanow’s *Far Too Close* takes distance as both its subject and its organising principle. Across photographs made over seven years, family portraits and domestic interiors are set against landscapes from Siberia, Sakhalin Island, Tierra del Fuego, and the Kola Peninsula in Russian Lapland. The book moves between the intimate and the geographically remote, asking how nearness to a person or place can coexist with emotional and historical estrangement.

Hoogland Ivanow’s dark, heightened visual language gives these images a presence that is at once concrete and poetic. The interiors and portraits locate the work in the sphere of community and lived experience, while the distant landscapes carry the weight of places marked by difficult histories, dispute, and discontent. Rather than treating geography as spectacle, the sequence binds far-flung terrain to the emotional registers of home, memory, and unease.

The result is described by its publisher as a literary tale: a photographic structure that shifts from disturbing to familiar and reflects on photography’s ability to convey history and emotion across different kinds of distance. That tension gives *Far Too Close* its particular seriousness. For collectors, its interest lies in the coherence of the conception—the sustained dialogue between private portraiture, domestic space, and politically charged landscapes—and in the way the work makes remoteness feel psychologically near. It is a considered example of contemporary photobook practice in which atmosphere, sequence, and subject are inseparable.