In APRIL, Ilisa Katz Rissman’s first book, she invites the reader to inhabit the longing for an unrealized dream of an intact family, re-imagined from the perspective of her older self. Through intimate portraits of women and children taken at different stages of life, vivid moments of stillness, fragments of text, and carefully composed spaces, Rissman creates an experiential language for her complex and shifting relationship with loss. Of APRIL, New Yorker editor Giada De Agostinis wrote, “The way she captures light becomes a personal quest and a visual endeavor at the same time, collapsing notions of time and space.”

Of APRIL, Rissman writes: “I photographed my children (and others) over several years in rental homes we pretended were our own. Living among their possessions felt as if we were granted permission to inhabit their seemingly perfect lives. These homes became vessels where we could play out our daily rituals, unburdened by the outside world. Here, time slowed, and light became our timepiece. I spent sleepless nights creeping around until dawn, desperately wanting to hold my children in the quiet stillness of these imagined safe spaces. Did I somehow believe I could protect their innocence? The impossibility of this may be obvious, yet with my camera, I could pretend; marriage and motherhood became stories I invented. The ghosts of those I’ve lost move through the shifting timeline. They are always present, gifting psychic connections and reminding me to embrace our only certainty, emptiness."