Mafalda Rakoš’s *All in this together* begins with a question photography is not well equipped to answer: how does social isolation reshape a person’s inner life, and can another person’s mental state ever be captured on camera? Working with four protagonists—Sara, Elias, Flora, and Manuela—Rakoš approached the problem through a hybrid method the publisher describes as both artistic and anthropological. Conversations, drawings, and portraits were not separate activities but overlapping ones, and over time the exchange itself became the subject. The book asks how an artistic project can meaningfully overlap with a therapeutic process, and where the two must remain distinct.
The project’s central tension is representation. Rakoš examines not only the difficulty of portraying someone else’s interior world but also the discourses around representation that shape anthropological research. The broader question the work raises—what the state of mental health under a capitalist society looks like—is pursued through specific encounters and the protagonists’ non-substance addictions.
Eriskay Connection has given the book a form that matches its dialogical character. The 170 × 230 mm volume runs 136 pages in English, wire-o bound with varying page sizes, letting the sequence shift register rather than settle into a uniform rhythm; browsing becomes a physical experience of discontinuity. Carel Fransen designed the volume, with production by Jos Morree (Fine Books). An essay by Alexander Cabeza Trigg and conversations with James Davies and Anna Rakoš extend the inquiry beyond the image pages. Rakoš is credited with photography and interviews, with photography assistance by Allan Tavares; Dieuwertje Hehewerth served as editor, with editorial assistance from Lukas Meixner, Marieke Descheemaecker, and Paola Lesslhumer. Text contributions come from Alexander Cabeza Trigg, Anna Rakoš, James Davies, Mafalda Rakoš, and Marieke Descheemaecker.
The book sits in a lineage of photographic practice that treats the portrait as a negotiated event, carrying its hybrid of documentary, art therapy, and performance into its physical structure. It warrants attention as a sustained attempt to test what photography can honestly claim about another person’s mind.
