Handmade Photobook Week: Sylvie Redmond

Handmade Photobook Week: Sylvie Redmond by Vicente CayuelaAugust 27, 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. Today we take a look at the project River Elegy by Sylvie Redmond.

Nahar shares: “I was struck by the simplicity and sublimity of River Elegy by Sylvie Redmond. A minimalist in structure, the book is complete and full in its own way. Sylvie transforms her grieving process meditatively through the Polaroids and her poems. The tangible aesthetic of imperfection, color shifts and blurring carries the river of grief and passage of time sequenced masterfully with the text in this book. It makes you turn to the next page and see the image of the same river in a different way and it becomes a deeply spiritual passage which has flowed through time, carrying with it the sorrows and grief of countless souls. This quiet book with a simple cover is a perfect balance between elegance in design, layout and content.”

A brief Q&A with the artist follows.

Sylvie Redmond is an interdisciplinary artist and mother working in photography, text, and the book form. Her work investigates personal narratives dealing with themes of family, motherhood, time, and memory. After an early start, Redmond returned to photography in 2020 following a 14-year career in education. She is a 2024 graduate of the Long Term Photobook Program through the Penumbra Foundation and is currently an MFA candidate in Photography through the University of Hartford. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Houston Center for Photography, Baylor University, and FotoNostrum Barcelona. Redmond was a 2023 and 2024 Critical Mass finalist, an overall winner of the 20th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and an Editors’ Pick for both LensCulture’s 2022 Portrait Awards and the Home 2021 International Photography Prize. Redmond lives and works in Minneapolis with her family.

Follow Sylvie on Instagram: @sylvie_redmond

Laila Nahar: From my own experience, working on this book can be deeply personal and emotional. What was the motivation behind making River Elegy a book project? How important was it to make this book by hand as opposed to getting it through a commercial publisher?

Sylvie Redmond: When my father was diagnosed with an unexpected and aggressive cancer, I found myself grasping at the remaining moments with him. I began photographing the river that cuts through my city. I photographed obsessively, every day standing in the same spot on the bridge and recording the weather, date, and time on the back of each Polaroid. These photos became an accounting of days. As they accumulated, the Polaroids began to feel symbolic of the passage of time–each one as unique as the remaining moments I had with my father. Altogether, the Polaroids span 648 days. My father died almost exactly a year from the date of my first photograph, so they represent my last year with him and my first year without.

In the book form, River Elegy is a meditation on the biological rhythms of nature, time, and grief. It combines a selection of these daily photographs with forty-four poems I wrote before and after my father died. Together, they become a physical embodiment of the grieving process. The images of the river move forward relentlessly with fidelity to the seasons and sequence. However, grief, its own river, is less predictable; it runs through a long valley, and at every turn, a new landscape is revealed.

Materiality is important to the book. The thin paper I ended up with wasn’t available through a commercial printer, and making it myself widened the options available to me. The translucent pages allow for permeability between the pages, fostering a dialogue between text and images. Previous images linger because you’re never quite able to turn the page on them.

Making this book by hand was a labor of love, but it was an undertaking of necessity. The making helped me through the grieving process, as if by stitching the pages together, I was also stitching myself back together.

While this version of the book was meant to be handmade, I’d love to find a publisher to partner with for a small run of this book. It would make me happy to find a way to get it out into the hands of more people.

LH: What is inspiring you now? What’s next in your book-making journey?

SR: I have just completed my first summer of Hartford’s Limited Residency Photography MFA, and I am feeling very inspired by my classmates and the amazing faculty I was privileged to work with. In terms of book making, I’m excited to explore continued iterations of River Elegy. I’m interested in creating a time-based, durational experience that includes every single image taken over the course of the project. I’ve also been thinking in terms of a book as an exhibition, and I’m working through drafts of a sculptural accordion book that includes the dates, weather, and time of each Polaroid. I love the idea of a river-like book that encourages the viewer to interact with it in a non-traditional way – when stretched out in an exhibition space, the viewer needs to physically walk around the book, mimicking my walk across the bridge each morning. I find bookmaking endlessly fascinating, and I can’t wait to see what else I discover about my work as I play with different image pairings and formats.