I Have A Room With Everything by Melanie Bonajo

Taken between the years of 1998 and 2005, the images in this exquisitely printed volume present anti-journalistic, documentary style photographs. Some are real, some staged, some of everyday life. All at once they are moving, whimsical, goofy, dark, haunting, romantic, and ultimately revelatory. With series such as “I Love My Parents,” “Action-hero’s,” “Thank you for hurting me I really needed it,” “Liberation from Form,” “Clouds often Cry,” and “Waiting for Allah,” Bonajo worked with fictive interventions. In so doing, Bonajo’s work hovers over the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the artificial, producing images that are sometimes naïve and sometimes self-conscious. The images in the book meld the absurd into the everyday and ordinary. By photographing different people who are close to her, such as her family, friends, and acquaintances, the viewer gets to know Bonajo as an artist who likes to play with the world right around her.