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Title: Za Nami

Author: Nicole Reber

Publisher: Self-Publish

Website: http://nicolemariereber.com/publicationarchive/

Pages: 32

Size: A4

Category: Photography

Review:

Today we gonna take a look to the book "Za Nami" by the artist Nicloe Reber.

Honestly, I will not write much about this book. It's a very personal work, Nicole wants to shoot is family, the family que she's not to much connected, his traditions, their way of life. I like the book, especially the photographic part. I think the story is very interesting, and she managed to capture very well what is proposed. Truly a nice work!

Regarding the printing, on this field I think the book could be better, a matt paper would work best here. The layout in my opinion could also be a little better, there are many variations throughout the book. However binding only with an elastic band is very interesting.

"These pictures were taken in May of 2012 while I was living with my extended family in Poland. It was my first time seriously photographing in over a year. I had spent a year professionally fighting with people as a customer support representative at a call center. The job was as bad as you can imagine but the one thing it did give me was an ability to forge trust quickly. Trust plays a big role in photographing my family, as I only see them every other year or so. It’s an especially sensitive job taking these pictures. On one hand, I’m capturing my blood relatives, yet they live an almost opposite life to me. They speak a different language, they all live with a few minutes from each other, they are ubiquitous in each other’s personal lives. With my limited time to visit, I have to reconnect with my family and build the images that I want, yet not feel like I am shooting my family as an “other” that I happen to have access to. These photos are my attempts to try to fit into a family that I don’t look and live like, but desperately want to be a part of.

“Za Nami” comes from the chorus of the traditional May prayers that are said by Polish families to honor the Virgin Mary. Each line of the prayer ends with the line “módl się za nami,” meaning say a prayer for us. The development of this chorus adds an aspect of lowliness that I always admired as a child. An intention for God to take the time to say the prayer, a hope that he would look down upon your prayers and be sending the same good intentions back. It held a distance from repetitive prayer that held court in my Catholic school. As a child, I would sing these prayers every day of May with my mother, grandmother, and any other Polish friends that happened to be around. A table in my grandmother’s room would have a framed postcard of the Czarna Madonna (black Madonna) surrounded by candles that I would dip my fingers in after prayer to the dismay of my mother. When I came home from school, I’d gather flowers from my backyard (and occasionally stealthily from the front yards of the neighbors who were still at work.) On that last trip, I happened to be in Poland during this prayer time. It had been many years since I sang those prayers, often being away at college for the most of May. My grandmother and I walked to the end of the dirt road in the dozen deep farming village my family lives in. In a small concrete room a woman handed me the sheet of paper with the list of the saints on it. We started singing but I quickly put the paper down. I could feel everyone watching me and I felt almost out of body remembering the words, the complicated order, the patterns of the saints names come back to me so easily. I looked at my grandmother astonished and proud. I knew in that moment that was where I came from, that my heritage was not just an adjective, but that I had visceral connection to the traditions of a world I never fully lived in. So the book was titled “Za Nami”— for all the family that has taken me in, and kept these traditions so alive in me that I could live continents away but still sing the same verses as the 20 people gathered in a wheat field a world away."

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