Monumental Moments gathers 929 anonymous amateur snapshots, assembled over roughly a decade by the Dutch collector and editor Erik Lieber, who came upon the first of them while browsing an auction site in 2014 and could not shake the sense that he had seen it before. The images follow two unidentified Japanese women — Lieber calls them “Mom” and “Girl” — photographed repeatedly between about 1955 and 1996, usually in or near tourist landmarks, across at least fourteen countries. It resembles a Grand Tour stretched over decades, beginning and ending at home.
The collection is organized around repetition rather than chronology. Many of the pictures exist as multiple prints, often made in different formats; the women return to the camera again and again in what amounts to an unending series of self-portraits. Lieber borrows the term “orphan snapshots” for these prints, separated from whatever family context once held them. Personal attention saturates them, yet they were ultimately discarded — a tension the book leaves open.
Lieber’s essay accompanies the plates, and he shares editorial responsibility with Frank van der Stok and Jeremy Jansen, who also designed the book. The Eriskay Connection issues it as a 352-page softcover with dust jacket, 17 by 24 centimeters, in English. The scale suits the material: enough pages for accumulation to become the argument.
Monumental Moments declines to reconstruct an unknown family’s life or to narrate it anecdotally. The publisher poses the questions bluntly: to what end, and for whom? As the archive expands, the women’s faces obscure as much as they disclose, which is the book’s real subject — the transience of self-images, and whether this long accumulation of faces might best be read as a memento mori. For collectors drawn to archival work that thinks about photography’s entanglement with memory and loss, it is a substantial example.
