Tante Simone

‘I wanted to make this book—this memoir, this memory of the house of someone who had meant a great deal to me, to us all, and of a universe which was a sort of laboratory for what I was to become’.
—Dominique Nabokov

Photographer Dominique Nabokov was raised by her aunt Simone from the age of four, in a detached house surrounded by a modest garden in the French town of Compiègne. Those formative years would be a blend of everydayness—from picnics to car rides in the family’s Deux Chevaux—and of vivid daydreams propelled by her fascination with Hollywood and its stars. After her aunt’s death in 1999, Dominique decided to photograph the house, as it was left, to keep a record of the place where it all began and a memory of the person behind it.

This book follows Dominique’s celebrated Living Rooms series, which intimately portrayed the interior worlds of the cultural nomenclature in New York, Paris, and Berlin, three pivotal cities for the photographer. Our publication of these volumes, born out of a series originally commissioned by the New Yorker in the ‘90s, renewed an appreciation for the French photographer. This is our fourth collaboration in a relationship that spans more than a decade, and is Dominique’s most personal project to date. The photographs are accompanied by a vivid memoir, written by Gini Alhadeff from an interview with Dominique, to give a glimpse into her generally unknown and extraordinary life story.