Stacy Mehrfar’s The Moon Belongs to Everyone takes migration as its subject and something less nameable as its terrain. Published by GOST Books, the 112-page hardback gathers portraits and scenes set in a landscape the book deliberately leaves unlocatable, so that no single border, coastline, or city absorbs the meaning. The people who appear come from different parts of the world. Many do not know one another. What they share is a condition rather than a place: the suspension between an origin left behind and a life still taking shape elsewhere.
Mehrfar came to the work through her own immigration to Australia, and the book treats that experience as an allegory rather than an anecdote. A shifting, non-specific global identity is its real preoccupation — the growing number of people whose sense of self is no longer administered by national borders but by the crossing itself. The Swiss binding suits a project built on layering, where images accumulate into a state of mind instead of a documentary record. Photographs, and the way they are ordered and held in the hand, do the arguing here; the reader is placed in the same hovering space as the subjects.
The result sits at a quiet angle to the traditions of the photoessay and photojournalism. Its interest is not in crisis reporting or in arrival, but in the long interval when a person is neither wholly there nor wholly here. Mehrfar’s cast is drawn from many backgrounds and never reduced to a single type, which keeps the book from becoming a thesis about any one diaspora. Grief for lost roots and the search for belonging are held together without resolving into either.
The book is a considered volume that treats a subject of broad urgency through intimacy rather than spectacle. Read as an object as much as a document, it rewards return visits — the layers shift, and the moon of the title keeps its promise of something shared rather than owned.
