Leon Borensztein’s Tata takes its title from the Polish word for father. Its subject is the photographer’s own father, identified by the publisher as “Citizen M. Borensztein,” born in Mińsk Mazowiecki in 1912. The book is built not from portraits or domestic scenes but from a record of official recognition: a Grunwald Badge awarded in 1947 by the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army for armed struggle against the Germans, then a medal for “Victory and Freedom,” then the many further medals he received through the 1960s.
That concentration is the book’s method. Across ten duotone plates, badge follows badge, and the publisher describes the effect plainly: as the list of commendations grows, the photographs of the badges begin to feel heavier and almost claustrophobic. The final spread breaks the pattern with a white shirt bearing a single medal, presented in 1974 by the Ministry of Defense of the State of Israel for volunteering in the Yom Kippur War. Because the preceding pages have established accumulation as the book’s rhythm, that solitary medal registers as a deliberate release rather than a merely chronological ending.
Tata is the eleventh entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, and its form is inseparable from the project. The publisher lists a hardcover volume of 16 pages with 10 duotone plates, accompanied by one original signed photograph. The small page count and restricted plate count force the editing down to essentials, while the paired print gives the object a second life as a signed physical artifact alongside the sequence. The publisher also states that the edition is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5×7 inch original print signed by the artist.
Borensztein’s photographs have been widely published and exhibited in the United States and abroad, and the publisher notes their inclusion in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. For a collector, the interest of Tata lies in how tightly the sequence, the small format, and the signed print work together: a modest-looking book whose cumulative structure does the emotional work, and whose final spread depends entirely on what the earlier pages have made the viewer feel.
