Engraved in ghostly black and white, Anna Ardent’s debut monograph, Vanishing, conjures a world of dreamlike dread and beauty.

Arendt was born in the German Democratic Republic. Her parents were born 1940 in Germany, children of war. Both of her grandfathers had been soldiers, who had been in Po- land between 1940 and 1942. One came back 7 years after the war was over, the other one never returned.

Photographed between Germany and Poland over 15 years, the work slides back and forth through time like a blood memory. Walking naked through the dark forest, wolves circling, howling. A daughter becoming a mother becom- ing a grandmother becoming a child. Haunted villages, and souls in jeopardy. The harsh reality of the past merges seamlessly with moments of rapture that feel plucked from a Grimm fairy tale.

Vanishing an unforgettable depiction of how beauty and brutality coexist in the hearts of men and beasts.