In the Shadow of Things with Photographer Leonie Purchas

As one of our favorite and oft-used photographers, Leonie Purchas has graced the FADER with her probing, visceral portraits of Bat For Lashes, Little Boots and Tough Alliance, among others, and we’ve admired her personal work documenting families across the world and the ties that bind them. For her latest gallery show, though, she’s taken on a more intimate subject: her own family. For In the Shadow of Things, she documented her mother’s struggle with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as she unpacked moving boxes that had been shelved and unopened for 12 years. In what must have been a difficult process for Purchas, she ended up truncating the distance between photographer and subject, in the process turning the camera into a sort of magic vessel for coping. It won her the KLM Paul Huf Award out of 81 nominees, and will exhibit through October 25 at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam as a result. After the jump, check out a few more images and read her artist’s statement.

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