UNB15! Artist Features: III
UNBOUND15!
July 1 – August 8, 2026
LAILA NAHAR & AMAYA MAHMUD • DANA STIRLING • VAUNE TRACHTMAN • CLAIRE KOSKY • AMANDA SAUER • RICH-JOSEPH FACUN • ALINE SMITHSON • TOD KAPKE • JENNY YIYUN KUO
LAILA NAHAR & AMAYA MAHMUD | FOLSOM, CA
Handmade artist book, Coptic binding with exposed spine. Hardcover imagewrap. Booklet of art-plates as a pamphlet in a separate insert inside the book. Archival inkjet print on Japanese Digital paper. 6.5in x 9 in. 160 pages.
Edition of 40.
'The Crescent Moon' is a collaborative book project between Laila Nahar and her niece, Amaya Mahmud (18). The work reflects Amaya’s inner world using her painting/sketching/writing and photographs as she is struggling with Eating Disorders/Anorexia. Amaya has been drawing consistently since she was a child. The drawings evolved over time and together with strong words it shows how Amaya’s feeling towards her body changed. Laila’s photographs and collages had been taken along the way.
The Crescent Moon, 2026. Handmade artist book, Coptic binding with exposed spine. Hardcover imagewrap. Booklet of art-plates as a pamphlet in a separate insert inside the book. Archival inkjet print on Japanese Digital paper. 6.5in x 9 in. 160 pages. Edition of 40. $300
The young Amaya experience the world as a happy and flowery one, her drawings are compassionate. Laila’s photographs reflect her spirit and joyful encounters. Then starts the storming phase in Amaya’s mind, while struggling with Anorexia her writings and drawings become a perception of herself and the world around her. A mind that is cast into darkness and despair, crying for help. In the world of TikTok, Instagram and other social media many children are now trapped into exploiting virtual worlds. Amaya too. But this is not only a dark story, but also a story of courage and compassion. Amaya struggles and fights. Her love for nature and deep compassion could not be suppressed. Her journey continues.
The book delves as a conversation between Amaya through her drawing and writings and her care-givers’ trying to reach her positivity. Amaya and Laila had been working on this book since 2021. This evolved taking different book-forms. In 2024, at Reminders Project Stronghold Photobook Masterclass, Laila worked collaboratively with Teun van der Heijden on the concept, editing and art direction. The fundamental structure was set and it morphed into cohesion to tell the story of Amaya, a story that resonates in the heart of countless children and adults. The book delves as a conversation between Amaya through her drawing and writings and her care-givers’ trying to reach her positivity.
Artwork: Amaya Mahmud / Photographs: Laila Nahar / Text: Amaya Mahmud, Laila Nahar, Tanveer Khondker / Book Concept: Amaya Mahmud, Laila Nahar, Tanveer Khondker / Book design/Printing/Binding: Laila Nahar, Tanveer Khondker. Self-published 2026. Book structure: Coptic binding with exposed spine. Hardcover imagewrap. Booklet on art-plates as a pamphlet in a separate insert inside the book. Multiple full and half gate-folds. Archival inkjet print on Japanese Digital paper. 6.5in x 9 in. 160 pages, 150+ photographs (includes photographs of artwork).
Laila Nahar is a lens-based artist and bookmaker in California. Her work explores belonging, memory, cultural and collective identity. Her handmade photo artist books are in permanent collections of Fleet Library/RISD, Boatwright Memorial Library, University of Colorado/Boulder, Baylor University and Museum of Fine Arts/Houston. Her books won several awards and appeared in exhibitions including Griffin Museum of Photography, Photobookjournal, UnBound13! Candela Books + Gallery, Lucie Photo Book Prize Independent Category, DUMMY AWARD24 Shortlist, Athens Photo Festival APhF:24 Finalist, FotoEvidence W Award Finalist’25 (The Crescent Moon). Laila attended CODEX 2024 and 2026 with her books. Laila is the handmade artist book editor of Lenscratch.com.
Amaya Mahmud is a freshman in Physics and Philosophy major in Boston University.
DANA STIRLING | QUEENS, NY
Photo book,
9.45 x 7.87 inches, 112 pages.
Edition of 900.
$52
In Why Am I Sad, I find myself engaged in a profound process of self-examination, mental health and sadness - using the camera to explore the essence of who I am and my connection to the art of photography. My roots lie in a small town. Within this space, I grappled with a pervasive sense of loneliness that transcended both the physical boundaries and the emotional confines of my surroundings. Even in the company of others, I felt a profound solitude that echoed within and beyond those walls.
Home, rather than a sanctuary, was a place where the weight of stress, anxiety, and extensive sadness loomed. Family, instead of offering solace, became a source of inner turmoil. Unspoken but deeply felt, my mother's battle with clinical depression cast a shadow over me. I saw her lose more and more of herself, becoming less and less a person I understood.
In my youth, I perceived her sadness as a natural extension of my own sadness, failing to grasp the impact it would have on my journey toward understanding and confronting my own struggles with depression as I grow older.
why am i sad, 2024. Photo book, 9.45 x 7.87 inches, 112 pages. Edition of 900. $52
Photography, in essence, became my personal code, a means of externalizing the words I couldn't articulate verbally. In the silent dialogue with still life, I discovered a form of communication that transcended the limitations of human interaction. Objects, devoid of judgment, spoke the untold stories, becoming my voice in a world where words often fell short.
Despite physically distancing myself from the room that once encapsulated my struggles, the weight of sadness remains a constant companion. Photography, once a means of escape, has transformed into a burden, shaping both my emotional state and the aesthetic of my images. The absence of photography leaves me despondent, while the act of capturing images reflects the pervasive cloud of sadness that hovers above me.
Why am I Sad stands as a pivotal exploration, a journey into the intricate relationship between myself and the art of photography, viewed through the lens of my camera. It is an open-ended question, not posed with the expectation of a definitive answer, but rather as a beacon of hope—an invitation to rediscover comfort within the very medium that has been both a refuge and a challenge.
My work is an exploration of the interplay between personal struggles and the transformative power of artistic expression. Through the lens, I invite viewers to join me in questioning, in reflecting, and in the shared pursuit of finding solace and meaning within the complex tapestry of existence.
Dana Stirling is a Queens-based fine art photographer and Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Float Photo Magazine (est. 2014). Originally from Jerusalem, she holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts and a BA in Photographic Communications from Hadassah College. Her debut monograph Why Am I Sad (Kehrer Verlag, 2024) explores mental health, family history, and the emotional weight of everyday objects.
Stirling’s work has been exhibited at Candela Books + Gallery, Radiator Gallery, Vermont Center for Photography, Rockaway Artists Alliance, Brick Lane Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, and more. Her photographs and books have been featured in outlets including Hyperallergic, PetaPixel, It’s Nice That, LensCulture, Fisheye, Aint-Bad, Musée Magazine, and Lenscratch, among others. She is a Shutter Hub YEARBOOK Award recipient and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow Finalist in Photography, with earlier honors from the Gross Foundation for Excellence in Photography and the Google Photography Prize.
VAUNE TRACHTMAN | BRATTLEBORO, VT
NOW IS ALWAYS, 2025
Deluxe collectors clamshell edition with gravure print of Reverie,
10 x 12 x 2 inches, 100 pages.
Edition of 99.
Collector’s Ed $650 / Trade Ed $48
NOW IS ALWAYS, 2025. Deluxe collectors clamshell edition with gravure print of Reverie, 10 x 12 x 2 inches, 100 pages. Edition of 99. Collector’s Ed $650 / Trade Ed $48
NOW IS ALWAYS by Vaune Trachtman is a photographic meditation on memory, time, and the layering of personal and archival histories. The book presents 45 images, including a gatefold triptych, Strand, combining contemporary photography, archival negatives, and handwriting. The photographs, originally printed as photopolymer gravures, are reproduced here for the first time in book form.
The book is designed as a distinct object with two separate parts. The left-hand text block contains a foreword by Major Jackson, “The Second Language of Memory,” and an essay by Trachtman, “Bound but Separate,” reflecting on her background, influences, and process. The right-hand image block contains only the photographs. The structure allows the images to be encountered on their own while the writing provides context for the work. Tracthman's essay’s title also refers to the book’s form: the ways we remain bound to the past while also separate from it.
Through this sequence of images and the physical structure of the book itself, Trachtman explores presence and absence, the passage of time, and how memory shapes perception and experience.
Published by Tusen Takk Press and printed at Trifolio in Verona, Italy, the first edition hardcover measures 10 × 8 inches (244 × 192 mm) and spans 100 pages. It is printed on Arena Natural Rough 200 paper and bound in Swiss binding with cloth-over-board covers, foil stamping on the front, spine, and back, and a vertical printed belly band on the back cover.
The Collector’s Edition of Now Is Always is a deluxe, numbered edition presented in a rigid, cloth-over-board clamshell box with gold foil stamping on the front, spine, and back. At the heart of the Collector’s Edition is Reverie, an original photogravure by Vaune Trachtman, signed and numbered, housed alongside the book within the clamshell box.
Vaune Trachtman is a photographer and printmaker whose work honors historic processes without relying on toxic chemicals. Formerly a master printer of silver-gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she began rethinking her materials after feeling that traditional methods were compromising her immune system. She now creates photopolymer gravures with little more than light and water.
Vaune has been in Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 50; shortlisted for the international Hariban Award; received the Olcott Family Award in The Print Center’s ANNUAL Competition. Her series NOW IS ALWAYS was recognized as a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards. Her book NOW IS ALWAYS was recently published from Tusen Takk Press with a foreword by poet Major Jackson, designed by David Skoklin and printed at Trifolio Press in Verona Italy. The book won Trifolio’s Special Prize alongside titles from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aperture Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art.
She lives and works in Vermont, in a former textile mill overlooking the Connecticut River.
CLAIRE KOSKY | LEXINGTON, VA / HUDSON VALLEY
Home Slaughter, 2025. Photo book, 9.25 x 9.25 inches. Edition of 30. $300
Home Slaughter was photographed throughout the Hudson Valley on small farms where animals are slaughtered on the same land where they were raised. To make this work, I befriended the owner of the only USDA-approved mobile company in the state of New York, Greg Stratton. He called me before weekends when he planned on traveling to a farm. For a year, I met him on very early mornings and often followed him to multiple farms where I connected with farm owners to make portraits and landscapes in their pastures. Some images were shot with a 4 x 5 view camera, while others were made at the same aspect ratio with a digital Nikon, which was far easier to maneuver in the volatile slaughter yards I shot in. Each photograph is painstakingly printed as an archival ink jet print on Canson Baryta paper, which I find affordably produces silky blacks and a deep range of mid tones.
Here is an excerpt from my project statement, explaining my attraction to the slaughters: “Her hide falls into a dress, embellished by waves of muscle tissue. Enveloping her carcass, it pours downwards and gathers on the ground in a train of folds. Hanging in this form, the cow is no longer a cow. She becomes something else, an amorphous pendulum swinging between forms, unfastened from the clarity of death. Home Slaughter emerges from this moment of ambiguity, when the remains of being—fragmented body parts, internal pieces, patterns on skin—are elevated beyond themselves.”
By making formally rigorous compositions and abstracting my subjects, I balance the sensation of the slaughters. These photographs occupy a liminal place of terrible beauty, where the truth of the human-made world appears to the gaze of an uncertain, hesitant fascination, bringing us to consider the nature of which that world is built.
Claire Kosky is an artist living and working between New York and Rockbridge County, Virginia, where she grew up. Drawing on her experience living in rural places, Claire creates compassionate examinations of the interactions between humans and the natural world using large format film and digital photography. Her work tends to abstract living beings and familiar places to move into a space of terrible beauty, where the truth of the human-made world appears to the gaze of an uncertain, hesitant fascination, bringing us to consider the nature of which that world is built. She received her BA in photography from Bard College.
AMANDA SAUER | DC
Giant Willow Oak, 2025. Photo book, 8.7 x 13.2 inches. Edition of 500. $75
I practice a long, slow gaze. I photograph the same landscapes over many years, using repetition to invite chance and bear witness to environmental change. My work focuses on a specific ecosystem or tree in an attempt to grasp the large-scale ecological crises reshaping our future.
Craft is important. I photograph with a large format camera, using film to record my observations of light and time. I develop and print my negatives in my darkroom by drawing on decades of experience. It is a deliberate process that leads to a deeper understanding of each image, as well as endowing a hand-made quality to each print.
Giant Willow Oak is an artist book that centers around a majestic tree, one of the oldest and largest in Washington DC. Here I made photographs while slowly circling the tree as a way to reference to the Earth’s revolution around the sun. Each page shifts perspective and time, with the tree appearing to turn with changing seasons. The final images connect back to the beginning to reference the cyclical nature of time.
The concept is playful but the intent is serious: to reclaim a deeper connection to nature. In my symbolic orbit, I became tethered by awe and reverence for this singular tree. My experience became an invitation to invert the human-centered narrative, to see myself as part of a greater system. It was I who traveled around the tree, yet in the photographs, it is the tree that turns.
Giant Willow Oak was made using sustainable materials. The cover is screen printed on 100% recycled cardstock and the pages are printed on bamboo and recycled cotton paper. The book weaves together photographs representing two time-scales: the annual revolution of the Earth around the sun (2021-2022); and an extended last moment before the tree was felled (October 2023).
Amanda Sauer (b. 1977) makes photographs and books to visualize time and reimagine relationships with the natural world. She works in response to place, often over many years, using repetition to invite chance and bear witness to environmental change. Her work is influenced by her previous career in climate change research and policy where she published on environmental topics.
Amanda's first book To Measure Time was self-published in 2022; it has been collected by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Her latest artist book, Giant Willow Oak, was shortlisted for the PhotoBook Museum’s Dummy 24 award and has been recently published by L'Artiere Edizioni (2025). Giant Willow Oak is in the collections of the Getty, Columbia University, and others.
Amanda is a recipient of 2019-2026 Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and her work is included in the DC Art Bank collection (2018, 2019, 2023, 2026). She has exhibited in the US and abroad, including as part of INDEX NATUREA at Fotografia Europea 2024 in Italy and the Dummy Award 2024 world tour, with exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Poland, France, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. Her portfolio was selected for the Urbanautica Institute Award 2024.
Amanda is a professor at Northern Virginia Community College where she teaches visual literacy and large format photography. She has an MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA in economics from Cornell University. Amanda lives with her family in Washington DC.
RICH-JOSEPH FACUN | MILLFIELD, OH
1804, 2025. Photo book, 9 x 11 inches, 116 pages. Edition of 500. $65
1804 is the final installment of a photographic book trilogy exploring place, labor, and identity in Appalachian Ohio. Preceded by Black Diamonds and Little Cities, the work examines how cycles of industry, economic change, and institutional power shape everyday life across the region.
Named for the founding year of Ohio University — the first federally endowed university in the United States — 1804 centers on Athens, Ohio, where the university functions as the town’s dominant economic and cultural force. Like many Appalachian communities historically tied to extractive industries, Athens has long been shaped by a single institution. The university provides opportunity and stability, yet it also creates forms of dependency that echo the structure of a modern company town.
The photographs were made during a period of disruption beginning in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic closed the campus and exposed the town’s economic reliance on student presence. As an alumnus and university employee, I approached the work from both inside and outside the institution, reflecting on how higher education shapes youth culture, labor, and the surrounding landscape.
Working within a documentary tradition, the images move between portraiture, public space, and small observations of everyday life. 1804 considers the contradictions of higher education in rural America — an institution that promises mobility and progress while remaining entangled in economic dependency, political pressure, and the shifting cultural identity of the communities it inhabits.
Rich-Joseph Facun is an Otomi and Pinoy storyteller, photographer, and publisher presently based in the Appalachian Foothills of southeast Ohio. His work aims to offer an authentic look into ways in which individual identity is influenced by the economic, geographic, and community norms of a given landscape. The exploration of place and cultural identity present themselves as a common denominator in both his life and his photographic endeavors.
Facun’s photography has been commissioned by various publications, including NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica, NBC News, AARP, The Associated Press, Reuters, Vox, Adweek, Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The FADER, Frank 151, Topic, The Guardian (UK), The National (UAE), Telerama (France), The Globe and Mail (Canada) and Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), among others.
Additionally, his work has been recognized by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, CNN, Juxtapoz, British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post, American Photography, Feature Shoot, It’s Nice That, The Image Deconstructed, The Photo Brigade, Looking At Appalachia, and Pictures of the Year International.
In 2021 Facun’s first monograph Black Diamonds was released by Fall Line Press. The work is a visual exploration of the former coal mining boom towns of SE Ohio, Appalachia. Subsequently, it was highlighted by Charcoal Book Club as their “Book-Of-The-Month.” Black Diamonds is also part of the permanent collection at the Frederick and Kazuko Harris Fine Arts Library and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s Research Library.
His second monograph Little Cities, was released in Autumn 2022 by Little Oak Press. The work examines how both Indigenous peoples and descendants of settler colonialists inhabited and utilized the land around them.
1804, Facun’s third monograph, considers the ways in which heritage, socioeconomics, and youth culture are shaped by the dominant institution within an Appalachian town.
ALINE SMITHSON | LOS ANGELES, CA
Photo book, 6.5 x 10 inches, 44 pages.
Edition #73 of 100.
$20
Created in response to a traumatic facial cancer surgery, this book gathers a series of found photographs of women in bandages—images that are at once poignant, unsettling, and unexpectedly humorous. Through this collection, I sought comfort and connection during a time of profound vulnerability. The work reflects on how we confront transformation, beauty, and resilience in the face of physical and emotional healing.
Softcover, 52 pages, Singer Sewn Binding
Smiling with One Side of My Face, 2025. Photo book, 6.5 x 10 inches, 44 pages. Edition #73 of 100. $20
Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, editor, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, influenced by California artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor, working alongside some the greats of fashion photography, Smithson returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice.
She has exhibited widely with exhibitions at institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and the Haslla Art Museum in South Korea. In addition, her work is held in major public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, and Harper’s,
Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. She has been an educator at institutions around the globe since 2001. Smithson received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and she also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2022, the Lucie Foundation nominated her for Photo Educator of the Year. In 2024, the Los Angeles Center of Photography established the Aline Smithson Next Generation Award.
The Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to a series of portraits for the Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In 2018 and in 2019, her work was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2019, Kris Graves Projects commissioned her to create the book LOST II: Los Angeles that is now sold out. Peanut Press Publishing released her monograph, Fugue State in Fall of 2022, also sold out. Her books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. In 2022, Smithson was honored as a Hassleblad Heroine. In 2025, her work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50 portfolios. With the exception of her iPhone, she only shoots film.
TOD KAPKE | DENVER, CO
The Astra Syzygy Codex, 2025. Photo book, 6 x 9 x 148 pages. Edition of 100. $45
In response to the pandemic's upheaval, an age gripped by twin specters—boredom and terror— The Astra Syzygy Codex provided solace in the realms of science fiction, and mythology, believing that sci-fi transports us from the Ho-hum, offering escapism, while also reflecting our collective fears. Inspired by the 1800s Great Moon Hoax, which planted the seeds of wonder and gave rise to myths of hidden worlds, along with hypothetical planets like Vulcan, X, and Tyche, this story unfolds as a myth about the disappearance of one of those planets.
Each day, I created a new piece with the idea of a stream of consciousness guiding my creative process, a single thought (or image) evolving and transforming over time. The Astra Syzygy Codex defies a singular narrative forming a surreal cosmos that shifts and blends multiple perspectives and techniques, My role was akin to a translator transcribing these 3 different alien transmissions.
Tod Kapke, a Denver-based photographer, crafting photographic fiction and constructs, blurring reality and constructed landscapes. I have always viewed photography as a futuristic time machine. Not to record and document but to create imagery that cannot be seen in the everyday.
JENNY YIYUN KUO | NYC
Imprint, 2025
Handmade accordion artist book,
3.75 x 8.5 inches x 30 pages
Edition #6 of 10
The project Memory Case is rooted in family archives. I uncovered a box of letters written by my grandfather to my father, along with family photographs from the 1970s. Drawn to the fragility and translucency of the letters, I was equally intrigued by the embedded narratives, which prompted me to reflect on the evolving nature of family and how its meaning is continually reshaped by social change and personal experience. I used the letters as negatives in an enlarger to produce photograms, then integrated them with my own photographs through masking and double exposure. To echo the traces of my grandfather’s handwriting, I later incorporated chemigrams, imprinting my own fingerprints directly onto the darkroom paper. Through reframing and rephotographing, this body of work explores how memory and familial bonds remain in flux. This project serves as both anchor and echo, holding absence while re-situating history in the present.
Imprint, 2025. Handmade accordion artist book, 3.75 x 8.5 inches x 30 pages. Edition #6 of 10. $375
Jenny Yiyun Kuo is an artist and architecture designer, whose work bridges built spaces and photographic narratives. She was born in Taipei, Taiwan while her family originated from Hong Kong and Macau. In her teenage years, she moved to the States for education and later relocated to Japan for work. Having lived across various cultural settings, she is keen to explore the idea of identity and memory as evolving legacies shaped by time and place.
Jenny holds a BFA and BArch from Rhode Island School of Design, and she recently completed the One-year Certificate Program at International Center of Photography.
