Carol Allen-Storey’s “Defying the Myth” grew out of more than a decade of sustained attention to three single mothers — Shoulana, Annalisa and Nicola — and their children, who live with severe disabilities. Published by GOST Books in 2026, the clothbound volume is listed by the publisher at 104 pages with 57 images printed in four colour and duotone. The project belongs to a strand of photographic practice in which the camera is less an instrument of observation than a reason for an ongoing relationship. Allen-Storey has said she began the work to give primary caregivers a public voice; what the book records is how that intention was reshaped by the families themselves.
That reshaping is the project’s real subject. Over years of shared trust, what began as documentation became a collaboration, and the book carries the evidence: drawings, artworks, poems and written testaments made by the mothers and children appear alongside the photographs, so that authorship is distributed rather than concentrated. Forewords by Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, and Fiona Shields, head of photography at The Guardian, frame a volume that refuses the usual registers of disability imagery. In Ward’s words, the children are to be seen not as burdens or as sources of inspiration but as themselves — Kallan drawing Transformers, Mekhye at twenty-two confounding every prognosis written about him, Maria flashing the metal sign on a beach.
For collectors, the interest lies partly in that structural decision. Photobooks that admit other people’s images and words into the sequence are harder to make than monographs, and the balance here between Allen-Storey’s photographs and the families’ own contributions is the thing that will date the book to this moment in documentary practice rather than to any earlier tradition of advocacy photography. The design and sequencing carry the argument; the book does not rest on a single signature image.
GOST Books has a record of publishing work that sits between reportage and long-form authorship, and this title extends it. Proceeds from Allen-Storey’s share of sales are directed to the three mothers for their children’s futures, a detail that says something about the terms on which the work was made. Collectors tracking how documentary photography is being renegotiated with its subjects will find it a considered example.
