APRIL is a meditation on time’s elusiveness, layers of loss and holding on/letting go. These themes are explored through intimate portraits, vivid moments of stillness and fragments of personal writing. Encounters infused with latent longing and psychic connection – often missed or misread – are noticed and bared without judgement. Created over many years, the work holds past and present in conversation. A deceptively bucolic world shaped by maternal rhythms becomes unsettled through shifts of light and perception, quietly alluding to the persistent disillusion undermining life's promises. About APRIL, New Yorker photo editor Giada De Agostinis wrote, “The way [Rissman] captures light becomes a personal quest and a visual endeavor at the same time, collapsing notions of time and space.”

Ilisa Katz Rissman’s photography has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Galerie Huit Arles and the Berlin Foto Biennale. Her award-winning work has been featured and reviewed in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Feature Shoot and Slate. She studied photography and film at ArtCenter College of Design. Rissman is currently developing two projects thematically connected to APRIL yet distinctly different. She lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters.

Designer Statement:

Is the naked page an image in and of itself? Is absence actually a kind of presence? Silence, some noise just beyond us? How else can we reconcile nothing without giving it a name? Frankly speaking, APRIL is a book about grief. I say this not to constrict this body of work into a term Webster’s Dictionary has only allotted eleven words, but to indicate how Ilisa Katz Rissman expands that definition.

Upon first glance the intimate pictures illustrate something innocent and nostalgic, but there is a quiet uneasiness in their disobedience of time. The characters age and rejuvenate; they get closer and further away. Ilisa paces her house of memory, repaints its walls, makes its beds, all with the tact only a mother has. Botanical motifs surround this story: drooping orchids, lilac chapter markers, the patterns of ruffled sheets and tablecloths. The images and their respective negative spaces remind us of our own deciduous nature. 

Throughout the first five chapters our proximity allows only sight — we know just enough for naivety to keep us warm. “She sits across from the woman, almost free,” whispers a voice in the final chapter. Almost… just beyond… unable to fully reach…  the haunting amalgamation of shortcomings reveals our true position. This does not mean the work lacks hope or solace. It doesn’t tell us that we are wrong or that we must suffer. It only suggests we look. -A.P.J.