Paper Lighthouse by Keavy Handley-Byrne
Published Saint Agnes Studio, 2023
Essay by Margaret Sartor
Design by Cara Buzzell
Perfect Bound Paperback, 56 Pages, 6” x 8.75”
Digital Offset & 1-Color Risograph
Printed & Bound by Conveyor Studio
Edited by Jessina Leonard & Keavy Handley-Byrne
First Edition, Edition of 40
︎
$24
“She was notorious, my mother says, for blinking or closing her eyes at exactly the moment the shutter released. There are only a few photographs of my grandmother that I can call to mind and fewer still where her eyes are open. I began collecting photographs of other women with their eyes closed, trying to find what I could of my grandmother in their faces.”
– Keavy Handley-Byrne
In Paper Lighthouse, the artist Keavy Handley-Byrne brings together found images of women with their eyes closed: accidental archival photographs tossed aside before there was a delete button. “But accident always plays a role in photography,” writes artist and writer Margaret Sartor, in her essay included in the book. “Because it is precisely in the unpredictable and unintentional details of a photograph that the magic of the medium flourishes.”
Referring to the New Brunswick town in which Handley-Byrne’s grandmother grew up, known for its lighthouse, Handley-Byrne departs on a wayfinding journey towards their grandmother through the interior world behind these womens’ eyes – a world, as Sartor writes, that is “as large and unfathomable as the Milky Way and as private as the scenes that play out in these pictures.”