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A Collaborative Book of Photography and Prose
by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman
Essay by Cora Fisher

June 11th, 1:00-3:00 PM

Reading & and in Conversation
with contributors Cora Fisher and Swati Khurana

Westbeth Community Room
55 Bethune St, New York, NY 10014
No RSVP required.

For over a decade, artist Jody Servon has documented objects people save when those they love die, and writer Lorene Delany-Ullman has written accompanying prose poems based on interviews and details the objects’ owners shared. The resulting body of work gathered in Saved: Objects of the Dead (Artsuite, 2023) is a visual and poetic narrative of how grief manifests and how material possessions help harbor memories. Two New York public launch events for the book will be hosted by Westbeth Community Center and Pennington Friends House on June 11 and June 18, respectively.

In Saved, the color images of objects such as a hairbrush, a lighter, a star ornament, and a pocketbook, are presented on one side of each page spread, and details of the object’s significance are on the facing page in prose poem form. This diptych quality reinforces the relationship between the words and the images and provides an intimate glimpse into a fragment of someone’s personality and life. The words and photographs, like grief, are stories within stories, at once personal as well as universal.

Curator and writer Cora Fisher contributed an essay for the book, and she also comments on the relationship between the images and writing, “The combination of photographs and prose creates a candor around mortality, one which has helped contributors process the juggernaut of grief after a loved one dies and, when the loss is not so immediate, has provided for a collective rumination on mortality. Taken together, the images and texts are a menagerie of life held within loss.”

Download more info on book here: Saved_NYC_Events