Melonie Bennett began photographing her family in 1990, and Holy Cow! gathers roughly two decades of that work: sixty-six black-and-white images made through 2011, published by GOST Books as a 176-page hardback. Bennett grew up on a dairy farm, the eldest of her siblings, and took a high school darkroom class at the same time she became the designated driver ferrying relatives and friends to parties. That position — sober, watchful, permitted to look — shaped a practice of observing rather than arranging, and it runs through the book.

The photographs concentrate on people and what they do to and with each other. Bennett writes that she has no pictures of the land, only the landscape her family occupied, living out its pleasures and troubles. Rites and holidays, arguments and reconciliations, dogs, babies, drinking, the absurd juxtapositions she has always been drawn to — a dog in cowboy boots, boys playing cards in bras, the pairing of pregnant and beer bellies. Humour, prized in the household, works as relief from a persistent heaviness rather than as decoration.

Interleaved with the pictures are recollections by Bennett’s brother Merritt, who once marked her picture-taking by gifting her a single unexposed roll of film on family occasions. The book therefore carries more than one voice and more than one account of the same events, an unusual construction for a family album.

Collectors of contemporary documentary photography will find here a sustained body of work with an internal chronology and a distinct authorial position — neither sentimental nor detached, made from inside the family and aware of what that vantage costs. The book’s humour and its attention to ordinary rites give the sequence its own texture within a crowded field of domestic photography. Published in 2026.