Evoking feelings of nostalgia or disorientation, DiDonato’s work teeters between the familiar and the fantastical. Inspired by family homes in Ohio, her compositions challenge expectations of how space can be occupied. Torsos, legs, and arms contort into uncanny arrangements across sofas and ascend into attics. Ordinary surroundings often have a compelling presence—white picket fences, cornfields, deserts, and sidewalks become sites of unexpected psychological encounters as figures are subsumed by their environments. Her pictures are playfully titled—Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns—and poignantly touch upon contemporary anxieties and universal themes of love and loss.
The most extensive collection of DiDonato’s work to date, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer brings together her most well-known bodies of work, including A House is Not a Home, alongside new works published here in print for the first time. A short introduction from writer Eleanor Sutherland provides an overview of DiDonato’s practice, while an intimate conversation between Emmy award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and Brooke’s father, Bob DiDonato, offers a personal glimpse into her evolution as an artist.
Reviews
Brings together DiDonato's surreal work in a collection that blends nostalgia, humor, and unease.
— Wallpaper*
In an image culture often driven toward spectacle, DiDonato’s grounded surrealism expands the medium’s expressive range by remaining close to the real. The absurdities she presents are not departures from reality, but slight reconfigurations of it, small enough to be plausible, persistent enough to be disquieting… DiDonato has produced a photobook that is both coherent and quietly ambitious, one that rewards sustained attention and affirms the continued vitality of photography’s more introspective possibilities.
— PhotoBook Journal
A sustained exploration of perception, memory, and the instability of the familiar… DiDonato transforms everyday environments into sites of silence disruption. Her images do not abandon reality. They refine it, sharpen it, and gently push it out of alignment, revealing how easily the ordinary can slip into something strange.
— My Modern Met
Contributors
Brooke DiDonato
Author
Brooke DiDonato is a visual artist from Ohio based in New York City. DiDonato’s images propose scenes of everyday life distorted by visual anomalies. Extreme landscapes and domestic spaces stand in for the subconscious mind while bizarre scenarios call into question the boundaries of reality. Follow her on Instagram @brookedidonato.
Eleanor Sutherland
Introduction By
Eleanor Sutherland is an arts writer, editor, and the creative producer of Aesthetica magazine.
