Handmade Photobook Week: Elysabeth Cianci

Handmade Photobook Week: Elysabeth Cianci by Vicente CayuelaAugust 25, 2025

The Griffin Museum of Photography has recently assembled a wonderful exhibition dedicated to handmade photobooks, curated by Sangyon Joo, founder of Datz Press and Datz Museum in Gwangju, South Korea. The first of its kind at the New England museum, the showcase is dedicated solely to handmade photo books, turning its gaze to the tactile delicacy of these wonderful artifacts. The 20 books selected for their outstanding craftsmanship and powerful authorial voices are a sensorial feast. Each one is a unique reminder of the importance of the artist’s hand in the dissemination of independent photographic media.

Lens-based artist, publisher, and photobook maker, Laila Nahar, was invited to select her top picks as a guest critic at the exhibition. This week, we take a look at her Top 6 selections. First off, we have Elysabeth Cianci‘s evocative work, THESE ARE OUR FEW SEASONS. The project is a profound visual engagement with American author Annie Dillard’s 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975.

Juror Laila Nahar states: “I was deeply fascinated with the content, thought process and design of Elysabeth Cianci’s book object THESE ARE OUR FEW SEASONS. The narrative evokes the sense of wanderings and solitude, the quiet wonder of nature and our connections with the natural world. Elysabeth combined several elements masterfully – the letterpress poems and drawings, the ephemera, the grainy photographs, accompanying foldout and the translucency. All stitched together elevates the experience of the book in a subtle and beautiful way. “

Portrait of Elysabeth Cianci by © Anna Leigh Clem

As a matrix-based artist creating work in series and multiples, Elysabeth Cianci sustains an interdisciplinary practice within the fields of analog photography, printmaking, and letterpress printing. Cianci’s work celebrates the history of the photographic process and its ephemeral beginnings as it relates to time-bound work and often draws upon the ideas of trace, layers, convergence, and erasure to represent a multiverse made known through a collection of visual-mappings and careful charting of the natural world. She refers to her images, artist books, and works on paper as field notes: untidy records documenting our marked and unequivocally deep interconnectedness to ecological systems.

She received a BA in creative writing from Gordon College in 2015, and an MFA in Photography and Integrated Media from Lesley University, College of Art and Design in 2020 where she studied under photographer Christopher James. Her work is held in several private collections, as well as the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Dividing her time between her home in the mountains of Vermont and the Boston area, Cianci serves as Visiting Lecturer in Printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and in the Studio Arts Department at Lesley Art + Design. Additionally, she is on staff at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

When she’s not creating, she can be found in a riverbed, reading Annie Dillard, or moth hunting.

Follow Elysabeth CIanci on Instagram: @efcianci

Laila Nahar: From idea to conception to materiality, how long did it take to make this book?

Elysabeth Cianci: The images found in THESE ARE OUR FEW SEASONS were created throughout a two year period, while the concept for the book, book design, letterpress printing, photographic printing, and binding were completed throughout the second year. I often view my images as a living archive that I mine and excavate. I’m not always fully aware of a finite concept at the time an image is made, but when I look through the view finder, I ask myself if the composition could be the page of a book. If the answer is “no,” I often don’t take the shot.

LN: What was the philosophy behind connecting your world to the one that Dillard depicted in ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’?

EC: I own several copies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; my enchantment with Annie Dillard’s writing began with an introduction to her work in an undergraduate writing class, in which Professor Bryan Parys assigned her essay “Living Like Weasels.” Discovering her lens of carefully observing the ephemerality of the natural world felt like a spiritual awakening. In the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition that I own, Dillard includes an afterword written in 1999 where she shares that, when addressing the use of the first person point of view, she used it as “a hand-held camera directed outward,” approaching her subject without any fear of man or God. I set out to apply the same point of view using an array of literal first person view finders, some mediating my interaction with the natural world, others the image coming right from my gut through the use of a Brownie box camera. Pilgrim is organized in annual seasons, a format Dillard says she initially resisted due to its conventional nature, but felt this was the best fit for “the already frail narrative.” I also resisted yielding to the structure of annual seasons, and instead fastened to what Dillard describes as “Our few live seasons” – seasons of awakening, the present, of recall, seasons of shelter, of greening, northing, of gravity, of God, doubt and belief.

LN: What made you choose different media like letterpress, drawings, photographs combined in this book?

EC: As a matrix -based artist, my artist books draw upon my interdisciplinary background as a photographer, printmaker, and writer. The craft of letterpress printing supports my use of language in my books, whether perceived or coded as I employ here with typographical ornaments. The inclusion of drawings in my photobooks are often sketches from images I’ve taken that I feel need to be brought to a skeletal state as a form of shorthand note taking. I consider my visual work a series of field notes: a working personal collection of visual-mappings and careful charting of the natural world. Specifically for this work, because I am communicating with a 27-year-old Annie Dillard through time and changing landscape (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek being first published in 1974), I felt it fitting to incorporate more of my creative writing practice through the inclusion of a Turkish map fold companion booklet in conversation with the visual narrative.

LN: What is inspiring you now? What’s next?

EC: My latest photographic artist book, Canopy, came out this Spring, the last remaining copies of which will be coming with me to the Griffin Photo Book Fair hosted by the Griffin Museum of Photography in September. The piece was inspired by a category of woodland wildflowers known as “Spring ephemerals.” These plants spend a brief few weeks above ground each year after the snow-melt, but before the canopy trees leaf-out, blocking out the sunlight to the understory of the forest. I’m currently working on a body of photogravure prints that explore the historic use, including Robert Frost’s summer writing cabin (Homer Noble Farm), of the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area that adjoins my home in Vermont.