Catherine Panebianco
Catherine Panebianco
Holding Time
Hardcover
9 x 7 inches
96 pages
Edition of 500
Yoffy Press
2022
About the Book:
Holding Time is a visual conversation between Panebianco and her dad. Every Christmas her father would pull out the same box of slides he has made in his late teens and early 20s and project them on the living room wall – making the family view them and hear the same stories over and over. By placing the slides in her current landscape, she creates not only a connection between his life and hers, but also a trail of memories, each with its own association for both of them.
These little vignettes of family life in her current “space” provide the comfort of family and create a “home” for her, wherever she goes. Finding the right location and uniting her father’s slides with how she lives today is an important piece of her process of creating a place within a place, a memory within a memory.
Book review by Maddie Smith |
Holding Time by Catherine Panebianco is a sentimental and deeply personal book that captures the essence of time, family, and our memories. Panebianco revisits her family's archived photographs, re-photographing them within their present-day surroundings, blurring the lines between past and present. With the addition of text by Irene Alison, these personal images transform into universal stories that become a powerful meditation on memory, the past, and the fleeting nature of time.
With each vignette, we are given a moment, an invitation to pause and reflect on our own lives, our own memories and histories. With the turn of each page, we are reminded of the power of family and the memories that shape our lives. Panebianco highlights the complexity and richness of time, and how it is the things we do that outlast our mortality.
Ultimately, Holding Time is a celebration of the medium of photography and the magnitude in which it has to connect and capture. The photograph is a powerful object, a preservationist of our memories and of time itself. And as Panebianco so beautifully demonstrates with this book, our memories can serve as our home. No matter where we go we can always have home with us, and like the photograph, we can hold a moment of time in our hands.
