Linda Troeller has photographed herself for decades, and the title of her 2024 book names the forces she has pursued through the camera: sex, death, transcendence. Published by TBW Books, the volume gathers self-portraits made across her life, in black and white and in color, using both traditional film and iPhone cameras. The sequence is not a retrospective survey so much as an argument about what a self-image can do—how the act of photographing oneself can become a ritual of realization and transformation.

Troeller, now in her seventies, turns the camera on her own aging body. That decision gives the work its charge: it pushes against cultural definitions of desirability and asks the viewer to reconsider what is worth looking at, and why. Her photographs are intimate, but they are not merely diaristic. They treat the body as a route to something beyond the intimate—what she has described as a surreal contact with the great beyond. The book’s three-word title sets up an expectation of grand themes; the images meet that expectation through specificity, not bombast.

The photographs span formats and eras, and the mix of film and phone pictures is integral rather than incidental. It lets the book move between different registers of self-regard, from the considered to the immediate, and it keeps the chronology from hardening into a simple before-and-after. Darcey Steinke’s essay provides context for Troeller’s individualistic approach, situating the work within a longer practice rather than treating it as an isolated statement.

The book’s physical form is equally deliberate. It is a faux-velvet softcover with hand-sewn saddle stitch binding, 96 pages, 48 color and 11 duotone plates, measuring roughly 9 by 13 inches. For collectors of photobooks that test the conventions of self-portraiture and the representation of age and desire, this is a considered addition: a book whose making and whose meaning are closely aligned.