Description
Sabine Hess
You Felt the Roots Grow
220x270mm
128pp
Offset Tritone Print
Edition of 750
ISBN 979-12-801772-5-4
First Edition co-published with Ciao Press and Witty Books
2023
Introduction
“I hold your hand and, carefully, try to capture it. Imprint on my brain the texture of your
wrinkly skin, the warmth of your touch, the way your fingers wrap around mine.”
After seven years of illness, my father’s battle with his cancer was coming to an end. I was torn between conflicting emotions, as my sister became a mother around the same time my father’s health declined. Watching a new life grow whilst another was weakening redefined my understanding of time – it became clear just how fragile life really is. At times, when home felt too close, nature gave my mind a safe place to rest. All the while, the forest’s slow growth and decay resembled the illness that was consuming life as I knew it. You Felt the Roots Grow was born in a time between hope and grief. It is my personal experience as a daughter, in which I face the bittersweetness of transience, the poetry within loss and the incompleteness of memory.
Sabine Hess (b. 1994), is a Swiss photographer, based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. She graduated from London College of Communication in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography in 2022. Her photographic practice centers around intimate narratives and notions of home, belonging, loss, and memory.
Alongside her documentary projects, Hess has experience in editorial and portraiture photography. Clients include FT Weekend Magazine, PORT Magazine, M le Magazine du Monde, and Jigsaw. Her first book You Felt the Roots Grow was shortlisted for the Star Photobook Dummy Award and published by Ciao Press and Witty Books in May of 2023.