Entrance to Our Valley

Jenia Fridlyand

The story of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, transposed and reversed through Fridlyand’s view camera.

Jenia Fridlyand uses a 4x5 view camera with flexibility and subtlety, rendering not only considered landscapes, but also domestic scenes of surprise and spontaneity. One senses ultimately the climate (literally and figuratively) of the valley in which her family is making a new home for itself. The simplest activities of housekeeping – eating and sleeping, planting and harvesting the garden, playing chess – are imbued with joy and gratitude in juxtapositions of interior and exterior life.

In 2017, Jenia Fridlyand created an artist’s book that sold out its limited run quickly and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Photobook Prize.

Publisher’s description. TIS, New York, 2019

Jenia Fridlyand (b. 1975, Russia) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. Fridlyand’s artist’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and trade editions were published by TIS Books in 2019 and 2020. She is represented by Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam.

Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads Collective and is the chair of the Long Term Photobook Program at Penumbra Foundation in New York. She studied photography at Centre Iris and Université Paris VIII, and holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.