Photobook Review: Juno by Louise Honee

Juno is the Goddess of childbirth, of marriage, of loyalty. This is a photobook that celebrates both the mythology and the reality in a book where the lightness of the design brings the worlds of nature and womanhood together.

Juno is a lovely book. It looks great, it feels great.

The loveliness starts with the cover. It features a cropped three-quarter rear view of a woman with damp locks looking away from the spine of the book. Her image covers half of a translucent acetate page, the side towards the spine bears the author’s name and title of the book against a grey card strip that holds the Japanese stab binding thread in place.

The woman reappears in the book, sometimes younger, sometimes older, but always as Juno. The first image shows her swimming underwater, in her element, her long hair flowing under the ripples of the pool. She’s slightly out-of-focus, both present and somewhere else at the same time.

There are images of trees by what may be a lakeshore, their branches bare, the still waters disappearing into the mist. There are deep charcoals as we descend into the corners of the image, but also a lightness as we move away from the waters, a tinge of the ethereal spirit that is conjured throughout the book.

A picture of a horse is stretched across the right of the spread, across the gutter and over the first third of the left-hand page. We’re not quite sure if it’s dead or alive. It could be resting on what looks like a scrubby riverbank, its head tilted down as it scratches its cheek on the sandy undergrowth. Or perhaps it is alive, its belly bloated, its rear legs separated by rigor mortis. We don’t quite know and perhaps we’re not supposed to know, suspended as we are between life and death. If we’re alive, no matter, we will be dead soon. And if we are dead, we were alive once. In the big scheme of things, they all amount to the same thing.

Juno appears again, her bare legs on the sofa, her hair tied back over her shoulders. She is a constant presence, the foundation on whom the world depends, part of the rhythm of life of which we, together with the sun and the moon, the rivers and seas, the plants and the trees, are all part. There are cygnets, a dog, clouds, and flowers blossoming against a bokeh background. There are rocks on a sandy shore, the half world where the water laps the sand, and the sea is not sea, and the land is not land.

The merging of identities is accentuated by the use of pink-tinged translucent inserts against which a portrait of a younger Juno appears.

Water is a recurrent theme in the book. It flows, it freezes, it descends as mist, all elements of the multiple identities of Juno. Similarly, the flowers, the trees, the grass grows, and it dies. All changes and all is constant.

Juno is a book about the fluidity of life, its transience, and the entropy that defines the world that we are part of. Life flows through the waters we see in the book, through the winds that carry the clouds and the seeds that grow into grasses and flowers and trees.

There is a solidity to the portraits in the book that combines with the lightness of the images of the elements of nature. Juno is made by Origini Edizioni, a small publisher that emphasises the importance of papers, bindings, and design that look and feel hand-finished.

This is what makes Juno such a pleasurable book, the lightness of the coated paper, the flick of the Japanese folds as you turn the page, the brush of the stab binding stitches against the grey cardboard strip. Sometimes, books can be overcomplicated by the number of papers, folds, and formats used, but here the simplicity and the directness of the design pull you into the story, rather than taking you out. In Juno, there is room to breathe.

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Juno by Louise Honée is published by Origini Edizioni

Photos by Louise Honée
Editing by Ilias Georgiadis
Book design by Matilde Vittoria Laricchia
Handcrafted work by Eugenia Koval
50 photos, 73 pages, b/w
Closed book dimensions: 24,5 x 25,5 cm
Paper: Favini Biancoflash Ivory 85g, Arjowiggins Curious Translucents Nude 90g, Real Yuzen Washi Japanese paper silkscreen printed in four different patterns.
Japanese handmade binding
250 numbered copies
Language: French and English

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Louise Honée is a portrait and documentary photographer. The central subject in her photography is the indestructible hope of the youth, capturing this fragile hope in all kinds of circumstances. Always on the look out for the poetry in a story, Honée gathers the images she creates together, in the form of a visual novella, wherein the people she meets have a role in their own context.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses and in person workshops begin in April, 2026. More information here. Follow him on Instagram.