Ruth Lauer Manenti: 4 Sides of the Table

Where do our hands go when words fail us? A comb through hair, a chair set back in its place, a cloth smoothed over a table's edge? 4 Sides of the Table, Ruth Lauer Manenti's spectral black-and-white photobook made between 2022 and 2024, is a study in the small gestures we perform when grief has no other outlet.

The images circle a woman named June — her mother's closest friend, photographed in fragments: hands, feet, the back of a linen dress, a comb moving through someone else's hair. We don't see her face until the final page. In between, Manenti offers us rulers laid side by side, an empty chair draped in cloth, a window blurred with light — measuring devices for something that can't quite be measured.

A soft, deliberate book, printed one photograph per spread so each image has room to breathe, 4 Sides of the Table reminds us that mourning is rarely dramatic. More often, it looks like tending — to a room, to a friend, to the ordinary objects that outlast us.