TWO (Harper Design; On Sale April 14, 2015; $29.99) is an exquisite collection of captivating and thought-provoking photographs by award-winning photographer Melissa Ann Pinney that contemplate the essence of duality in our relationships and in the world that surrounds us. Pinney, whose work is in the permanent collections of dozens of American museums, including the Metropolitan, MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty, aims her lens at pairs—mostly, but not always human—that display or imply elusive connections of mind, of spirit, or of simply the act of being. 

Edited and introduced by Pinney’s friend, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett, the volume is filled with memorable images that encase rich stories: two children at play, a pair of aging friends, parent and child, couples in love. But deeper meanings can lurk in the margins of the frame, in the expressions in the eyes, in the disconnect of the connection. Photographs without human subjects bear their own mysteries: two nesting tea cups, an indoor pool, two chairs in autumn.

 Patchett, whose enthusiasm for Pinney’s vision helped bring this project to fruition, has paired the photographs with remarkable essays about the nature of two, commissioned from some of the best writers at work today: Edwidge Danticat, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Alan Gurganus, Maile Meloy, Elizabeth McCracken, Jane Hamilton, and Billy Collins (who provides a beautiful poem celebrating “two creatures bound by wonderment.”)

“I’ve always been interested in watching people together. I wonder what their story is, who they are to each other,” Pinney writes in the preface. “”No matter how uninspired I feel, how dull I think a place is, when I look at the world through a camera a new beginning takes place.”

Filled with startling, sensitive images and nuanced prose, TWO is an illuminating  keepsake of human experience, at once universal and unique.

I made the first the Cellar Door picture in May, 2001, as a homage to the famous Alfred Steiglitz portrait of Georgia Engelhard.  We had just celebrated Emma’s sixth birthday with a party in the backyard.  Emma climbed up on the old cellar door;  I was reminded of Steiglitz's photograph... and so it began. 

It wasn’t until a year had gone by that I thought to continue the series, at first once a year and then once every season or so. Emma is now twenty-one years old and the photographs span more than a decade. We see Emma grow as the state of the house and garden change with her. My subjects here are emerging feminine identity, memory andthe passage of time. I asked Emma about her experience of the series and her response was a revelation to me.

Emma writes: "Over the years, my mom persuaded me with various incentives to climb up onto the cellar door to take photos; I remember resisting and arguing with her every time. I am grateful that she didn’t give up or give into my protests, especially during my angsty teenage years. Now when I look at the Cellar Door series I finally see what she always saw— a unique, meaningful compilation of my childhood and how I became the woman I am today. I remember who I was when she captured every image and why I chose each outfit for the series. When I look back on the Cellar Door Series I see the beginning of my love for sports that continues to this day; the comfort I felt as a “tomboy” skater girl at Montessori school; the intense pressure to act feminine and heterosexual at Catholic middle school; several stages in the battle against my eating disorder; and my slow acceptance of my lesbian identity. Individually, each Cellar Door image evokes touching memories, yet the beauty of my Mom’s vision lies within the series' collective power to reveal my personal growth and experience in a profound way."

The series, Girl Ascending, began with my photograph of a girl seemingly suspended in mid-air, holding onto a chain-link fence with one hand, her dress lifted by the breeze. The circumstances are commonplace: a baseball game, nondescript buildings and a dirt field seen through the fence. Nevertheless, the improbable levitation and serene demeanor of the girl suggested the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary to one, raised, as I was, on the symbolic imagery of Catholicism. I am interested in the passage of time, the cycle of the seasons, girls’ friendships and their ties to the elders who guide them. The images that most intrigue me are epiphanies, in which the ordinary reveals an underlying significance.

This project focuses on a touchstone moment in the lives of American women and girls: their emergence from protected youth to public maturity. From a core series of photographs of my daughter, Emma, the project has swirled out though friends and classmates, past their families, neighborhoods, social rituals, and community lives to develop a study of emerging female identity with all its promises and perils. 

My mother, at seventy years old, told me that every time she looked in the mirror she wondered who "that old bat" was looking back. In her mind’s eye she still had the face she had at eighteen. This, after eight children and forty years of marriage. The photographs in Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women & Girls explore both the persistence of the child-in-the-woman and the early cultivation of the woman- in-the-child. Girlhood may be understood as a part of a continuum that women revisit regardless of age. 

Before our child was born nineteen years ago, it was generally understood among friends and family that the baby would be a girl. After all, women had been the subject of my work for many years. This happy coincidence of biology and feminism presented me not only with Emma, a daughter I cherish, but with new opportunities for making pictures as well. When I began the series Feminine Identity in 1987, I focused mostly on adult women. Now the scope of my work has widened to more often include men as fathers, grandfathers, husbands and brothers. But in photographing my own daughter and our family life together - in regarding Emma day by day- it has become clear that the heart of the project lies in images of girlhood.

It was a tradition at the Academy of the Sacred Heart for Girls in Chicago to wear white dresses for graduation long before I attended high school there. When my daughter was getting ready for 8th grade graduation in 2009 I wanted to make a book of portraits for the class. I photographed each girl in the dress chosen for the ceremony in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton. In spite of many requirements having to do with color, skirt length, width of strap, height of neckline and over-all modesty, there was a wonderful diversity of style and expression among the girls.

Sunshine & Other States refers not only to Florida, the original sunshine state, where many of these photographs were made, but to other states both geographical and psychological, to states of mind and being, more often dark than sunny.

Chicago has a remarkable collection of swimming pools and historic field houses throughout the city. I discovered the Hamlin Park Pool when I moved into a north side neighborhood near the park, first as a dedicated swimmer and only later as a photographer. This was my first venture into documentary style, street photography. The Hamlin Park Pool taught me how to appreciate a situation where the light, the people and the environment itself was beyond my control. The studio is about building pictures through slow careful accumulation of detail but this kind of picture-making was about responding to the flow of energy among the children, anticipating where it might next become visible- and being ready when it did. The subject of water, girlhood and spontaneous play that I discovered in this project continues to preoccupy me; it can be seen throughout all my subsequent work.

I was drawn to photograph in Chicago's south-side, Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen because of the vibrant street-life. I met and photographed a teen-age ex-gang member who introduced me to his mother and sisters and then to his aunts, uncles and cousins. I photographed in bars, homes and at weddings. The project took me, alone and often at night, to what were then regarded as dangerous neighborhoods. The loneliness and risk that infused the pictures held a gritty allure for me.