Permissions gathers two decades of Emma Hardy’s photographs, drawn from her personal archive and shaped into her first monograph. The book moves between motherhood and childhood, love and longing, and the slow fact of leaving home. What holds it together is not a single narrative line but a sustained attention: to her children as they became adults, and then, turning the camera around, to her own mother and the relationship they had made together.

That double movement matters. Hardy is not simply recording family life; she is re-reading it. Domestic scenes we think we recognise sit beside images that feel more ethereal and amplified, so the book keeps slipping between the ordinary and something less easy to name. The sequencing across 160 pages, published in hardback by GOST Books, gives the work room to breathe rather than hurry toward a conclusion.

Running beneath the images is the book’s central concern: closeness, care, and the negotiations involved in looking at one’s own family. Hardy raised three children while sustaining her own professional life and creative practice, and the pictures acknowledge the cost and negotiation involved in holding both. The result is tender without being soft, intimate without pretending that intimacy is simple.

For collectors, the book has a clear place. It is a first monograph by a photographer whose archive has been worked over for twenty years rather than assembled quickly. An exhibition of the project coincided with the book’s publication at 10 14 Gallery, London, running from 1 December to 27 January. The subject of family, memory, and the gaze turned inward is central to the work, and Permissions approaches it through patience and restraint.