The Ephemeral Life

Book Reviews / Featured / March 11, 2026

By Suzanne Révy

Life is ephemeral. Photography cannot stave off the tragedy of death, but it might extend or expand life through faint traces of light and shadow. Discoveries found in pictures can bring long forgotten memories to the surface and open possibilities to learn more about past lives. Four recently published books address death, memory and the fleeting sense of time through evocative black and white or monochrome pictures that broaden an understanding of past and present. They are Craig Easton’s An Extremely Un-get-atable Place, Vaune Trachtman’s Now is Always, Amy Friend’s Firelight and Cheryle St Onge’s Calling the Birds Home.

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place by Craig Easton (Gost Books, London)

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place by Craig Easton, published by Gost Books. (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place by Craig Easton, published by Gost Books. (Book photographed by Suzanne Révy)

Photography and writing are often solitary pursuits. Craig Easton’s palpable meditation on George Orwell in An Extremely Un-get-atable Place emphasizes the spare rigor of crafting a novel through the desolate landscape on the Scottish island of Jura. Orwell lived there in the latter part of the 1940’s and finished his masterpiece 1984 there through illness. He suffered with tuberculosis, and we learn through several excerpts from letters and diaries that he was to some degree, dissatisfied with his novel. Printed on a lighter stock of paper, Orwell’s typewritten notes add context to Easton’s book without disrupting its visual and emotional ethos.

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place by Craig Easton, published by Gost Books. (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place by Craig Easton, published by Gost Books. (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)

Easton’s warm-toned black and white photographs are moody and resonate with memory. Two gatefolds reveal expansive triptychs that are atmospheric and dreamlike, while single images of trees or lanes undulating through the rolling landscape offer a psychological gateway for the reader to enter Orwell’s mind. In several pictures, a simple white farmhouse appears in the distance, and near the end of the book we see it with a single light ablaze in a window. Is Orwell still there? Toiling away on his typewriter? Orwell’s depth as a writer is in stark contrast to the desolate landscape and the spare details of the domestic interiors Easton photographed. Perhaps the complexity of his ideas flourished because he maintained simple and solitary surroundings, and yet, I can hear the wind howling over the meadows. Easton’s book is an eye-opening peak inside the creative life of one of the 20th century’s great writers.

Now is Always by Vaune Trachtman with a forward by Major Jackson, published by Tusen Takk Press.

Now is Always by Vaune Trachtman with a forward by Major Jackson, published by Tusen Takk Press.

Now is Always by Vaune Trachtman with a forward by Major Jackson, published by Tusen Takk Press.

Vaune Trachtman takes us on a journey to discover someone who has passed on in Now is Always. Her father died when she was a small child. She found and employed the photographs he made of his Philadelphia neighborhood between the two World Wars and discovered something of the man she never really knew. Collaging his pictures of the faces of anonymous neighbors with her contemporary work brings the past into the present. Her use of a slow shutter imbues the images with mist and luminosity while the unknowable faces haunt the work with poignancy. As a reader, my curiosity is piqued: when or how did these people live or die? And how do they haunt our lives today?

Now is Always by Vaune Trachtman with a forward by Major Jackson, published by Tusen Takk Press.

Now is Always by Vaune Trachtman with a forward by Major Jackson, published by Tusen TakkPress.

Trachtman’s book is an extraordinary object with an introductory booklet tipped into the inside of the front cover and a lay-flat binding for the pictures. The book’s intimate size is comforting, and the sequence of her sepia-toned images is fluid and harmonious. Her pictures imaginatively revel in the idea of memory. The final chapter, “All That Is” showcases a series where she incorporated condolence letters her mother received after her father’s death, love letters between them, and the notebooks her investigative journalist father left behind. The handwriting was often difficult to read, but Trachtman found his demeanor and personality in those quickly drawn letters and marks. The “collaboration” became a collegial effort between a daughter and her long-lost father. As a reader, I can sense a closeness between them.