Tender Mint

Tender Mint gathers three years of photographs Lynn Alleva Lilley made after moving to Amman, Jordan, with her husband and two children in 2011.

Far from home while her father was ill, Lilley used photography to make an unfamiliar country legible, photographing Jordanian citizens alongside Syrian and Iraqi refugees, animals kept in private zoos and farms, bird migrations, a biodynamic vineyard near the Syrian border, a veterinary clinic in Petra, and landscapes at the Dead Sea. The 144-page softcover, bound in linen, interleaves these images with two poems, by Jane Hirshfield and Samih al-Qasim, and two of Lilley's own personal anecdotes, building a picture of displacement, entrapment, and adaptation alongside unexpected beauty. It was published by The Eriskay Connection in Breda in 2017, designed by Rob van Hoesel, in a first edition of 750 copies funded in part through Kickstarter.

Tender Mint was Lilley's debut photobook. An American photographer drawn to place and to the photobook as an intimate form, she has continued to work at the intersection of personal experience, displacement, and landscape in the projects that followed it.