I Also Fight Windmills Book Launch: The Photographers' Gallery

The Photographers' Gallery, London · 8 February 2024

There's a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching a project you've carried for years finally step into a room full of people. On the evening of 8 February 2024, at The Photographers' Gallery, that's exactly what happened to I Also Fight Windmills.

It also happened to be my birthday.

Copies of Ania Ready’s I Also Fight Windmills displayed in The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop.

I hadn't planned it that way. The date landed where it landed, but there was something fitting about it. This book didn't arrive quickly. It grew slowly, through years of sitting with Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska's life and words, trying to find the right form to hold them - finally through performed and staged black and white photographs.

And then there was the venue itself. The Photographers' Gallery isn't neutral ground for me. It's where I took some of my first serious steps as a photographer, sitting through courses that shaped how I think about images before I knew where that thinking would lead me. Walking back in as the person being interviewed, rather than the person taking notes, was its own strange and moving kind of homecoming: not a return to something unchanged, but a return that measured the distance travelled.

Visitors browsing copies of I Also Fight Windmills during the book launch.

I Also Fight Windmills began with the life and writing of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska, a Polish writer whose story has so often been overshadowed by that of her partner, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Through photographs, archival material and fragments of Sophie's own writing, the book became a way of asking what happens when we look again at a life that has been preserved only partially, and what role an artist might play in bringing that life back into view.

Christiane Monarchi chaired the conversation with great generosity and enthusiasm. As the founder of PhotoMonitor and co-founder of Hapax Magazine, she has spent years championing photography with real care. Talking about the work with Christiane gave me an opportunity to reflect not only on Sophie, but on the long and sometimes uncertain process of making the book. We spoke about working with archives, about the relationship between text and image, and about the responsibility that comes with interpreting somebody else's life. At the heart of the project was always the question of how to make space for Sophie's own voice rather than simply speaking on her behalf.

There was something moving about discussing those questions in front of an audience. A photobook is such an intimate object, usually encountered quietly and one person at a time. That evening, the work became communal: pages, ideas and discoveries that I had lived with privately for years were suddenly being talked about in a room full of people.

After the conversation, we stayed for a book signing and a glass together. Ending my birthday surrounded by books, photography, artists and people interested in Sophie's extraordinary life felt like the best possible way to mark the day.

The evening also marked another milestone: I Also Fight Windmills joined the shelves of The Photographers' Gallery Bookshop.