JTF (just the facts): Published in 2025 by MACK (here). Softcover (16×22 cm), 304 pages, with roughly 300 color photographs. Includes an afterword by the artist. Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown and the artist. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Since relocating to New York City in 2014, the Mexican visual artist Martha Naranjo Sandoval has been thoughtfully and consistently documenting her everyday life using the same 35mm film camera. During that time, her photographs have accumulated into an archive of roughly 500 rolls of film. A selection of these images was first published in the zine Sangre de mi Sangre (reviewed here) and were featured in her debut gallery solo in New York, The Stench of Orange Blossoms (reviewed here). Naranjo Sandoval’s first full length monograph, Small Death, draws deeply from this archive, offering an intimately tactile meditation on migration, identity, and the subtle ruptures that accompany personal transformation. Unfolding like a visual diary, the book traces her decade-long journey from Mexico City to New York, rendered in film grain, golden light, and introspective self-portraiture.
The title, Small Death, stems from Naranjo Sandoval’s sharp observation: “You die a little when you emigrate. The person that you were no longer exists.” This sentiment permeates the book’s structure and tone, offering a layered narrative that is both intimate and expansive. The photobook is built from her growing image archive, distilled into a sequence that feels both deliberate and organic. It is not a linear story, but rather a constellation of moments, and each image is a fragment of a larger emotional and cultural transition.
Naranjo Sandoval’s approach to sequencing is recurrent. The book is shaped around original contact sheets and film reels, emphasizing process and materiality. She invites us into her archive, allowing us to witness not only what she saw, but how she saw it. The result is a photobook that feels lived-in, like a journal whose pages have been turned and returned to over time.
The images move fluidly between genres: golden hour streetscapes, abstract compositions, nude self-portraits, and tender photographs of family members. Her husband Dylan, her parents, her brother, and even her cat appear throughout, grounding the work in a sense of domesticity and relational familiarity. These portraits are not posed or performative; they are quiet acknowledgments of presence, of being seen and held.
Naranjo Sandoval’s self-portraits are among the most arresting in the book. They evolve from solitary documentation of her early years in New York to more experimental and sensual explorations of form. “I’m a heavier person and my body makes all of these shapes that I really enjoy, that other bodies maybe can’t do,” she notes. Her body becomes a site of introspection and celebration, resisting conventional beauty standards and asserting a radical form of self-love. The camera is often close (sometimes uncomfortably so) creating a sense of immediacy and vulnerability.
These self-portraits are interspersed with images of urban and rural landscapes, both in the U.S. and Mexico. The juxtaposition of place and body underscores the book’s central tension: displacement and rootedness. Naranjo Sandoval’s photographs trace a continuum between these poles, suggesting that identity is not fixed but constantly negotiated through geography, memory, and relationships.
The book’s design supports this fluidity, while also inviting close engagement. A small self-portrait of Naranjo Sandoval, presented as a film strip, appears in the center of its red cover, while the title in all caps and the artist’s name take over the spine. Inside, the images, placed against black backgrounds, vary in their sizes and placement, creating a continuous visual flow. Throughout the book there are a few white spreads with small portraits, creating visual pauses. There are no page numbers, captions or any other texts, and the tactile quality of the pages and the sequencing of images all contribute to a reading experience that is contemplative and immersive. Overall, Small Death the visual flow of the book feels dynamic and exciting.
What distinguishes Small Death is its refusal to isolate the immigrant experience into a singular narrative. Instead, Naranjo Sandoval offers a multiplicity of perspectives – visual, emotional, and temporal. The book is not about arrival or assimilation, but about the quiet transformations that occur along the way. It is about the small deaths we endure and the new selves we construct in their wake, and her focus on the complex experience of immigrants is particularly urgent today.
Naranjo Sandoval acknowledges the significant role her husband Dylan plays in her creative process, describing their collaboration as integral to both her artistic practice and their relationship. This dynamic partnership recalls the work of Pixy Liao, who similarly incorporates her partner Moro into her photographs, blurring the boundaries between intimacy and art.
In one particularly moving sequence, Naranjo Sandoval photographs her parents in their home. The images are tender and unassuming, capturing gestures and glances that speak volumes. These photographs are not nostalgic; rather they offer affirmations of connection. They remind us that migration is not only about leaving, but also about remembering, and about the ways in which memory is carried, reshaped, and sometimes lost.
In the end, what lingers are not isolated images but the feeling of having walked alongside the artist, through streets bathed in golden light, through rooms filled with familial warmth, through moments of solitude and self-discovery. Small Death is not a conclusion, but a continuation; it is a visual memoir that honors the complexity of becoming.
Collector’s POV: Martha Naranjo Sandoval does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. Collectors interested in following up should likely connect directly with the artist via her website (linked in the sidebar).
