My Wife

Petter Hegre, a commercial and fine-art photographer, began photographing his wife the day they met, eventually amassing roughly 5000 images over the course of their relationship. My Wife gathers a selection of those photographs into a single volume, opening with a short interview with Hegre before moving into around 200 pages of images that trace an ongoing, candid record of daily and intimate domestic life. Rather than staged portraiture, the book reads as a private visual diary, close observation sustained over years, that happens to have been made public. Published by Edition Stemmle in Zurich and New York in 2000, the book sits within a lineage of photographer-partner documentary projects, using the sustained, watchful intimacy of long-term domestic photography as its own kind of counterpoint to external surveillance.