Ahndraya Parlato Explores Transformation and the Passage of Time Through Photos and Letters
With TIME TO KILL, I look at gendered aging, unpacking the ideals of beauty, caretaking, and maternal and domestic duty imposed on women over the course of their lives.
My photographs—portraits, landscapes, still lives, and spaces both vast and claustrophobic—reveal cultural double standards and impermanence.
These images are interwoven with letters to an ambiguous, ageless, and perhaps illusory recipient. Through these mediums, I reckon with a variety of physical and emotional experiences, including the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how others see us as we age.
I picture transformation and the passing of time as both brutal and freeing and interrogate selfhood, motherhood, sacrifice, and visibility in an unflinching confrontation with what it means to be mortal.
Ahndraya Parlato, As Long as You Will Want To, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Ahndraya Parlato, Colleen, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
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Dear D,
I was sitting inside a café. From my position, I could see both the street and a large circular mirror inside, reflecting the contents of the sidewalk. As you passed, I was struck by your form, the way your shape cut through the heavy air. I was also taken aback by an asymmetry, one I couldn’t immediately place. It wasn’t until later, lying in bed, that I realized: the mirror had reflected a different balance of bodies than were on the sidewalk. That’s when I understood—you had no reflection.
I can’t say for sure whether you are or are not real. I’m no longer sure I know the difference. And, while I do have a reflection, I am often surprised to see it, as it usually does not match the picture I have of myself in my mind.
Us humans, we’re all going to die. But not you, you’ll live forever—never aging. What age is your body and how many years have you existed? What motivates you to get out of bed each day—moves you forward—without the inevitability of your mortality? Also, is there an age limit to wearing jean jackets? Should I keep them, or let them go to make room for something else?
Yours,
A
Ahndraya Parlato, Quiet Down, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Ahndraya Parlato, Gina Backbend, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
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TIME TO KILL (2026) by Ahndraya Parlato, published by MACK is available now.
Header image credit:v(L): Ahndraya Parlato, Zelma, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.v(R): Ahndraya Parlato, Mimi, from TIME TO KILL (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
Ahndraya Parlato
Ahndraya Parlato has a BA from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has published three books: Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), and East of the Sun, West of the Moon(in collaboration with Gregory Halpern), Études Books, 2014.
Additionally, Ahndraya has contributed texts to Double Feature (St. Lucy Books, 2025), Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014).
She has exhibited work at: Spazio Labo, in Bologna, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. Ahndraya has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop, and grants from Light Work, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She and has been a nominee for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.
Ahndraya’s most recent project, TIME TO KILL is forthcoming from Mack Books in 2026. She has taught in the Bard College and Cornell Image Text MFA programs and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
