Will Green caught Covid and, within the course of just two months, lost both of his parents to the virus. The photographs gathered in Death and Other Belongings were made throughout that intense period when, concurrent with the Covid-19 pandemic, his personal world imploded. This is not reportage from a hospital ward; it is the slower, more difficult work of looking at what remains when the people who anchored a world are suddenly gone, and of registering how ordinary rooms, objects, and routines absorb the shock.
Green works close to his subject, and the book’s intimacy is its method rather than its subject matter. Loss, fear, and legacy are named in the publisher’s account of the project, but the pictures resist illustration. Made across a period when private grief and public catastrophe were inseparable, they move between the specific and the general: a particular personal journey and place, and the wider experience of human fragility that the pandemic made impossible to ignore. The sequencing does not force consolation or resolution; it lets the weight accumulate.
GOST Books has published the collection as a hardback, with Green credited throughout as the photographer. The publisher’s edition details list 104 pages. The title’s second half, “Other Belongings,” points to the book’s real subject: the things left behind, and the question of what inheritance means when it arrives earlier than expected. Photobooks about illness and bereavement are not scarce, but ones made inside the event, by a photographer who had himself caught the virus, are less common. Green’s position gives the work an unguardedness that a later, retrospective treatment would struggle to reproduce.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in that proximity and in the care of its construction. It is a complete, self-contained project from a photographer working at a moment of extreme pressure, issued by a publisher with a clear commitment to serious photographic work. It does not need to be framed as a rarity or a monument. It needs to be read as what it is: a disciplined, unsentimental record of one family’s rupture, made during the rupture itself.
