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For me, photography is more like poetry than prose: scraps of information are there, which the individual viewer can piece together into some kind of narrative. --Martha Casanave

Trajectories: A Half-Century of Portraits is a collection of portraits by Martha Casanave that span from her childhood to her present-day work. Rooted in the desire to create narrative, Casanave's portraits evoke questions and leave space for more than one story to be imagined around her subjects. Casanave's portraits are marked by her careful attention to her subjects' environments. Some of the portraits in the book are of people she has photographed once, others many times over a span of years. Her work with immigrants, artists, strangers, and longtime friends acts as a mirror that reflects and illuminates the connection between our surroundings and ourselves--our cultures, our histories, and our own trajectories.

Martha Casanave, born 1946, graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1969, where she studied Russian language and literature, and Japanese. She began her working life as a translator in Washington, DC. She later changed careers, choosing photography, which she had engaged in since childhood. Casanave's photographs are included in many major collections, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stanford Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the New Mexico History Museum, the Polaroid Collection, the Russian Union of Art Photographers (Moscow), and the Russian Museum of Photographic History (St. Petersburg).