Minor Matters Books

MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi
MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi
MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi
MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi
MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi

MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi

$100.00

March 21 launch event at Printed Matter, Chelsea, NYC


12 x 18.5 inches horizontal; 112 photographs; 32 pages. Board back with stab and thread binding. Essay by Marvin Heiferman. 

ISBN: 979-8-9889751-0-6. $100 plus shipping



Lisa Kereszi’s earliest photographs from her teenage years are of her father, her grandmother, and the family junk yard they ran for fifty-three years. For over three decades she has collected objects and moments through her camera, while also maintaining an interest in tangible, physical artifacts that extend our relationships to memories.

In early 2018 her father died suddenly, less than a year after her grandmother passed away. Managing grief from these dual and significant losses was made more difficult amid contentious family strife. When her father’s newly-erected headstone was toppled and had to be re-mounted, Kereszi was further distraught, and asked family members nearby to rig an off-the-shelf trail camera within view of the plot. Through that device and its auto-generated photographs, she could “visit” her father’s grave daily, though she was hundreds of miles away.

Kereszi amassed thousands of images over a seven-month period that culminated in the trail camera’s disappearance (it was later discovered tucked behind a headstone). With the forced isolation created by the pandemic, her life as a human, a mother, and a professor radically changed. Seeking order and control when the world provided little of either, she began organizing grids of the visual visits to her father’s grave. This album of her efforts to manage mourning is presented at scale to the hand-created book she lovingly compiled as a record of her grief. 

In addition to Kereszi’s text and images, the book will include an essay by Marvin Heiferman.


LISA KERESZI (b. 1973, Chester, Pennsylvania; lives in New Haven, Connecticut) received her BA from Bard College in 1995, and her MFA from Yale University in 2000. She is the author of four monographs: Fantasies (Damiani, 2005); Fun and Games (Nazraeli, 2009), Joeʼs Junk Yard (Damiani, 2012), and The More I Learn About Women, (J&L Books, 2014).

Keresziʼs work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography, among others. Her photographs are in many private and public collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; New York Historical Society; Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.  She is the recipient of a 2023 Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellow, and was awarded the Baum Award for Best Emerging American Photographer in 2005.

Kereszi is Senior Critic, and since 2013 has been the Director of Undergraduate Studies, at the Yale School of Art. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery.


MARVIN HEIFERMAN (b. 1948; lives in New York) is an independent curator and writer, organizing projects about photography and visual culture for institutions including Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the New Museum. 

Earlier in his career, as a gallerist and artist representative, Heiferman worked closely with many defining artists and photographers of the twentieth century, including Robert Adams, Eve Arnold, Lewis Baltz, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, and Richard Prince, among others. 

Heiferman has written for numerous museums, galleries, publications, catalogs, blogs, and magazines, and is the author, editor, and packager of over two dozen books on photography and visual culture, including Photography Changes Everything (Aperture, 2012). Entries to “Why We Look,” Heiferman’s ongoing social media project, are posted daily.