Our artist friends were either completely destroyed by covid or the metamorphized like butterflies and created beautiful things. Both of these things happened to Helen Rosemier who lost her husband, Matt, during COVID and also created an astounding book about the swirling emotions. ZONES OF POSSIBILITY is a book of photography, memory, loss and celebration. It’s also a book filled with design elements that would send a publisher into spasms. “What do you mean you want to glue photo corners onto page 11 of every copy?” “What do you mean pages 24 and 25 need to be ripped in half? We already agreed to an embossed cover and a foldout flyleaf.” “Wait, you want loose photos stuffed in there too?”

ZONES OF POSSIBLLITY has an incredibly thoughtful, beautiful, and complex layout that includes archival images from her husbands family album, included with new photographs mostly taken in her garden during lockdown where she explored the unknown spaces that had surrounded their lives together all the years they were married.

This is a book about the unfamiliarity of familiar things — the lost right under our noses and the decoding details that we have never observed. 

Helen seeks to "complete"the understanding of her husband through the left-behind clues of his childhood, seeking out more moments together that can happen now only in the unknown and unknowable past.

This is a highly personal volume — there are no answers for outsiders — the what, who and how are all beyond our reach. We can only look into this collection of memories and speculate, as though flipping through a box of prints in an antique store. It's not a book of answers, only the yearning for answers.

But is also a beautiful book — an object of inspiration and a book about design. Once, in college, while staring at a Mark Rothcoe painting in I said "I don't understand why this is in a museum" and my compatriot, a painter, said "This is a painting about painting, and you don't understand it because you don't speak the language of paint." And that's stuck with me. That sometimes we might not understand why something is beautiful because we don't yet understand what we need to know to understand it. 

Throughout Zones of Possibility there are the signs of missing photos, slight shades of discoloration where things once were, memories that were preserved but are now lost — a forever unknowable hole in Helen's understanding of Matt.

We also need to talk about the exquisite design by Lisa Ferron, who gives us an object of ponderous beauty and mystery, and poetry contributed by Julian Dobson. 

You can get your own copy from Helen's website: https://helenrosemierphotography.co.uk/albums/0UE5/zones-of-possibility