Book Review: Find Me Paradise by Benita Suchodrev

“Paradise — if it exists — appears only in fragments, in shards, in disturbances, in moments that flicker and disappear before we can hold them.” Benita Suchodrev’s line is perhaps the closest thing Find Me Paradise has to an instruction. I found myself doing exactly that: moving through the book in fragments, returning to it, stopping, starting again.

There are photography books that tell you where you are, when the photographs were made, and what you are supposed to understand from them. Find Me Paradise, the new book by Benita Suchodrev, does very little of that. Published by Kehrer Verlag , it brings together photographs made over more than two decades, moving between places, periods and subjects without offering a chronology to hold them together. At first, the images can seem unrelated: a person followed by an animal, a landscape by an interior, an intimate encounter by something almost absurd. Gradually, however, proximity begins to do the work that narrative normally would. A photograph may seem self-contained until the next one changes its temperature or emotional charge.

This approach takes a little time to settle into. The book asks you to slow down and allow relationships to emerge rather than searching for a story that will explain everything.

I became increasingly aware of the fold between the pages. It acts almost like a hinge. Photographs meet there, sometimes unexpectedly, and the space between them becomes part of the reading.

One spread brings three gulls flying above a rocky, tree-topped cliff together with a close portrait of a bald woman with dramatic winged eyeliner. The birds move freely across a pale, textured sky; the woman looks directly at the camera, her dark clothing fading into the shadow behind her. For me, the contrast suggests movement and stillness, the untamed and the deliberately constructed. But the pairing does not settle into a single meaning. The woman’s gaze changes the birds, and the birds change the way I read her.

Another spread places a lonely stone hut and bare birch trees in deep snow beside a woman wrapped in an extravagant fur coat, her elaborate hair ornament and sidelong gaze giving the portrait an almost theatrical quality. The two photographs share the same cold atmosphere but seem to inhabit different worlds. One suggests shelter reduced to its most basic form; the other turns appearance itself into a kind of shelter, a performance of glamour and control. The relationship is not literal, but the images begin to echo each other.

These two pairings are just examples of the many unexpected relationships that unfold throughout the book. Taken together, they reveal how much the sequencing matters: the photographs don’t necessarily explain one another. They alter one another.

That alteration is sometimes subtle. A full spread can give an image room to expand, while elsewhere a photograph is placed alone beside a black page, suddenly isolated from everything around it. The effect creates a rhythm of interruption, pause and return. Suchodrev seems as interested in when an image appears as in the image itself. A photograph that might pass almost unnoticed in another context can become difficult to ignore simply because of what surrounds it—or because, for a moment, nothing does.

This is one of the things I found most compelling about the book. The relationships between photographs do not always feel designed to make a point. Sometimes they feel discovered. An image made years earlier can suddenly acquire a new resonance when placed beside something from an entirely different moment. The sequence becomes a way of looking back at the archive and finding connections that may not have been visible when the photographs were first made.

Suchodrev’s photographs also refuse to stay within one emotional register. They can be sensual, funny, unsettling, vulnerable, strange or unexpectedly quiet. Berlin and its nocturnal worlds appear in the book, but they form only part of a much wider field that includes animals, children, landscapes, interiors, still lifes and portraits. What holds these things together is not a single subject so much as a way of looking.

There is a strong sexual undercurrent, but desire is rarely presented as polished or idealized. It can be physical, awkward, tender, excessive or unsettling. Antoine d’Agata came to mind while looking at some of these photographs, not simply because of their sexual frankness, but because of the refusal to separate desire from discomfort. Yet Suchodrev’s photographs often pull back from extremity. Sexuality can sit beside humour, tenderness, banality and beauty without being turned into spectacle. That mixture makes the images feel less like declarations than encounters.

At other moments, it was the atmosphere of the photographs that stayed with me. The deep shadows, grain, blur and partially obscured forms can make some of Suchodrev’s images feel less like descriptions than memories that have not fully settled. What makes this particularly compelling is the way that uncertainty extends beyond individual photographs. Again and again, the sequence itself becomes part of the experience: an image can shift depending on what comes before or after it.

The photographs rarely tell us exactly how to feel about the people they depict. Even when the subject becomes explicit or uncomfortable, Suchodrev leaves enough ambiguity for curiosity, discomfort and empathy to coexist. Her subjects are not reduced to symbols of darkness or transgression. They remain people, caught in moments that may be intimate, performative, ordinary or impossible to fully decipher.

The black-and-white photographs give the book a strong visual coherence despite the range of subjects. The duotone images introduce subtle shifts in atmosphere without breaking that coherence. The book feels physically intimate despite the breadth of the archive it contains: close enough to invite repeated looking, expansive enough to keep revealing different relationships between photographs.

There is something important in the fact that these photographs span more than twenty years. Time is not simply background information here. It becomes part of the experience of looking. Photographs made in different periods seem to speak across the distance between them, and the act of sequencing them turns the archive into something fluid rather than fixed.

Find Me Paradise is therefore not simply a collection of photographs made over more than twenty years. It is also a record of looking back: at photographs, at people, and perhaps at earlier versions of oneself. Photographs can change as we change. Their meaning is not necessarily fixed at the moment they are made.

By the time I returned to the title after spending time with the photographs, “paradise” no longer felt like somewhere I was supposed to find. The word had become more elusive. I started noticing how often the photographs offer something—a body, a gesture, a landscape, a moment of intimacy, an unexpected encounter—and then take it away again.

I finished the book without knowing exactly where its paradise was. I only knew that, by then, I had started looking for it in places I might previously have passed over.

That is part of the pleasure of Find Me Paradise. It does not demand that every photograph be explained.

It asks us to look.

And then to look again.