Lynn Alleva Lilley arrived in Amman in September 2011 with her husband and two children, far from her native country and from her ailing father. Over three years she photographed Jordanian citizens, Iraqi and Syrian refugees, the migration of birds, and animals in private zoos and on farms. Her subjects included a bird sanctuary inside a water-treatment plant in a military zone near the Israeli border, a biodynamic vineyard close to the Syrian frontier, a veterinary clinic in Petra, and landscapes around the Dead Sea. The book’s concerns are displacement, entrapment, adaptation, and home, but also the discovery of beauty in contradictory circumstances.

What distinguishes Tender Mint is the way sustained attention turns into a meditative practice. Alleva Lilley worked in places that were self-contained and paradoxical; as she grew used to their rhythms, the photographs began to reveal worlds within worlds, culminating in an epiphany at a zoo where caged animals suggested both obvious confinement and unexpected kinship. Many images carry a fairytale quality that brings them close to poetry. The sequence holds opposing feelings together: nurturing and pain, suffering and resignation, solitude and companionship, beauty and decay.

The book, designed by Rob van Hoesel and published by Eriskay Connection in 2017, includes poems by Jane Hirshfield and Samih al-Qasim and two personal anecdotes by Alleva Lilley. Its 144 pages are bound as an Otastar softcover with a linen outer cover, measuring 20.5 by 29.7 centimeters.

For collectors drawn to photographic work that treats displacement without sentimentality, Tender Mint offers a coherent and quietly unusual example. The combination of Alleva Lilley’s attentive looking, the literary contributions, and the considered design gives the book a distinct place among photographic responses to the Middle East and to personal loss.