Thursday, Sep 18, 2025

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The photographer Zora Sicher began taking pictures at 14 as a high school student in Brooklyn. Those early images capture the charged intimacy of adolescence: a friend leaning into the mirror to smudge on eye shadow before a night out, another drifting to sleep in the late afternoon sun. That tender and unguarded sensibility has shaped Sicher's work since. Her new monograph,

"Geography," published by Dashwood Books, gathers 14 years of images into what she calls a "nonchronological map" of her practice and the people who shaped it. The earliest photograph dates to 2011; the most recent was taken in February. As the curator Gaby Cepeda writes in the book's introduction, over the years the photos become "a scalpel, cutting into an unexplored level of vulnerability." Sicher found inspiration for the book's title when she saw a staged adaptation of Joan Didion's 1970 novel, "Play It As It Lays," which included a line about "the geography of the human heart," suggesting that love is a kind of expanse, mapped across rooms, bodies and inner terrain. In Sicher's work, an overflowing bathtub or the curve of a tattooed, pregnant stomach carries the same weight as an Ansel Adams landscape. "Geography" will be released on Sept. 25, with an accompanying exhibition opening at Dashwood Projects in New York on Oct. 3, dashwoodbooks.com. 

By Colleen Hamilton