Photobook Review: 10 Years by Sandra Cattaneo Adorno

10 Years is a book of fishermen, beaches, construction and gold glimmering water. It’s an elemental book where earth, wind, fire, and water all play out in a sea of golds and blacks.

Most of all, however, 10 Years is a book object in itself where the printing, the binding, and the sequence all combine to glorious effect.

The first thing that jumps out about 10 years is the materiality of the book. It’s a heavy book, an expensive book, it costs a lot to print and make. It feels like a luxury.

Very often with photobooks, you know that the photographers are scrabbling for cash, trying to get their work out when they can barely pay their rent. Sometimes that tells in the compromises that they need to make in publishing and printing.

In 10 years, there is an expense evident in the printing and the book form. Many of the images are printed as negatives in gold ink on black paper. That has a strange effect. Nearly all the images have figures in them, but they are rendered anonymous both by the inversion of the image and by the fact that so many of the images are shot against the sun.

The figures lose their faces, they become black or white bodies, an expanse of limbs on the beach, figures walking on the promenade, or the stretches of playing football in the sand.

We don’t know who these people are, but they are people. And with the images made in Mauritius, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, New York, London, Italy, Portugal, and Japan, we don’t really know where we are, though the preponderance of gold, the stretches of beach, the vitality of life in all its forms makes me think that we’re in Rio, not that there is anything absolutely tangible to make us know that. There’s just an optimism in there, a positive energy.

The book is elemental. It begins with long-lens images of what look to be fishermen working with nets, the filigree of ropes working well with the gold. More water appears in panoramas of crowded beaches, in images where spray dots the foreground, the backlighting setting things off. The shimmers of light on water droplets, the haze that appears, the layering of foreground against background, the side trips into images of a built environment, the rush of people and the dreamy otherworldliness of it all are reminiscent of Trent Parke’s work.

Like the original dummy of Trent Parke’s apocalyptic epic, Monument, 10 Years comes in accordion form, all 176 pages of it. But while the published version of Parke’s book stuck to a more traditional and manageable form suited to its end times narrative, 10 Years eschews ease of handling and takes the form of a very long accordion book.

If you want to look at 10 Years in detail, your choices are to either play accordion fold catch-up as you try to negotiate the book standing up, or sit down at a table and take your time spreading the pages out, turning the folds over, and letting the repeated themes of the book spread their message into you.

So you sit down and open and unfold and you find yourself on a beach promenade in book form. You fold out and the images open up and close in. Water is always close, the sun is always close, reflections, layers, and silhouettes are always close.

What exactly that all means doesn’t matter. There is no big message here and there really doesn’t need to be. 10 Years is a physical book, a languid cocktail of heads in profile and limbs stretched out. It’s a beautiful book, perhaps the most beautiful book of the year.

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10 Years by Sandra Cattaneo Adorno is published by Radius Book

Artwork and text by Sandra Cattaneo Adorno
Hardcover accordion-fold with booklet
10 x 13.25 inches
176 pages / 93 images (total)
$60.00
ISBN: 9798890180780

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Sandra Cattaneo Adorno (b. 1953, Rio de Janeiro) took up photography in 2013 at the age of 60 and has since gained extensive recognition for her work. Like Dora Maar, who reinvented her photography practice in her 70s, Cattaneo Adorno is drawn to experimentation and to innovative ways of printing and presenting her work.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses and in person workshops begin in January, 2025. More information here. Follow him on Instagram