Do It Yourself / Hang in There, Baby by Trina Fernandez

A photobook about cooking, loneliness, mothers and daughters, personal artifacts and leftover pork butt.

Cleaning out her mother's house, Trina found a collaged cookbook of her mother's from the early 1980s, collecting recipes and what Trina calls "a blueprint for the start of her family." In Do It Yourself, using that cookbook as a starting place, Trina reassembles the improvised meals of her own adulthood, and art directs them with the same eye-watering sense of excess that one finds in the Good Housekeeping cookbooks of the late '70s. The recipes' instructions reflect the struggles and heartbreak in her own life, contrasting them with those of her mother's thirty years earlier. Both experiences are tied together with Trina's oversaturated, perfectly staged photographs of her own creations. The result is an examination of memory, loneliness, depression and family that is both very funny and deeply affecting.

Each book comes with a broadsheet-sized newsprint poster.




Related Items