Andoni Beristain made sixty-three photographs, one for each year his mother lived, and Setanta Books has gathered them into Pieza Madre, a hardback of ninety-two pages published in 2025. Ángeles Isidora Zabalo died in 2022. The publisher’s note describes a life of hard work and self-effacement, of care for the elderly, of clothing and food collected for refugees, of first-aid items assembled for people living without shelter, and of a shyness that never fully concealed her openness to others. Beristain’s answer to that loss was not a conventional memorial but a body of images and concepts built from her memory, her courage and her humour, made by a son whose hands, the publisher observes, are a copy of hers.

Yellow governs the sequence. The colour of bad luck and also of sunlight, joy and happiness, it works as a refrain rather than a decorative choice, and the book’s structure is equally deliberate: one frame for every year. Beristain describes the project as an exploration of the exterior, an attempt to fill a void and to tell a story, and the number is not incidental. It sets the pace of the book and keeps the photographs tethered to a specific life rather than to grief in general.

The book is hardback, 250 by 200 mm, with 63 images. The publisher’s description of the series is the principal account of its intentions, and readers should approach the book as an artist’s project rather than an illustrated biography. A special edition with prints also exists: each print is in an edition of 20 numbered and stamped copies, accompanied by a numbered artist label signed by Beristain, printed on Hahnemühle Pearl paper at 23 by 19 cm with a 1.5 cm white border.

What remains is the work itself. Sixty-three images made in response to one death, held together by a yellow that refuses to settle into either mourning or consolation — this is the kind of book that rewards slow, repeated looking, and it belongs in collections where the photobook is treated as a considered form rather than a record of a subject.