“You die a little when you emigrate. The person that you were no longer exists,” Martha Naranjo Sandoval tells AnOther, as her debut book Small Death is publishedSeptember 01, 2025
Martha Naranjo Sandoval has spent a decade dreaming about her first photo book. Since relocating to New York from Mexico City in 2014, she’s become a fixture in the city’s vibrant photographic community, working as the library manager at the International Center of Photography, overseeing projects for Dashwood, and producing zines through her publishing house, Matarile Ediciones. Spending her days poring over others’ work, some titles have shaped her idea of what makes a photo book truly remarkable – from Carmen Winant’s My Birth, with its tactile documentation of women in labour, to Nobuyoshi Araki’s Winter Journey, which sequences his wife’s final days in hospital and their honeymoon in a moving, elegiac rhythm. The culmination of this period of studying, making and observing the world through her own lens, Naranjo Sandoval’s debut book Small Death is finally here, published by Mack.
8Small Death by Martha Naranjo Sandoval
Assembled with the warmth of a family album, Small Death is a work of unusual beauty. It maps a fragmented, ten-year journey through the artist’s years living in the States, painstakingly selected from an archive of over 500 rolls of film. It grapples with various themes central to Sandoval’s life in this period, but the overarching question it bravely asks is: does a version of you die when you move to a new place? Painting a layered and personal portrait of what it means to be an immigrant in America today, the resulting book moves gesturally between golden hour streetscapes, searching nudes, abstractions and tender images of her loved ones. Offering a poignant reflection on borders and belonging, Small Death is released during a time when immigrant lives are under threat in Trump’s America, making its subject matter all the more pressing.
Here, the artist speaks on expressing love through image-making, the slippery nature of identity and the physicality of being a woman with a bigger body.
“When I was born, my dad got this camera and this book that was like a step-to-step guide to being a photographer. He did it all just to take pictures of me. My dad is not a very vocal person with his love, but seeing him notice me [through the camera] made me feel loved. Having that relationship to photography was important for me, even though I didn’t realise it at the time.
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Martha Naranjo Sandoval, from Small Death (Mack, 2025)Courtesy of the artist and Mack
“I left Mexico City in 2014, just two years out of film school. It was a ‘something has got to change’ kind of decision. I thought, I’ll just go to New York and do an MFA and we’ll see what happens. The US and Mexico are so close to each other and there’s so much exchange between them, but you don’t realise how culturally different they are until you move. I would come home at night after work and my head would hurt from speaking English all day. Physically, it felt like a huge change.
“I started taking pictures because I wanted to have a document of this alteration that was happening in my life and who I was becoming from it. When I started photographing myself, I had just moved here alone. You can feel the camera very close to my face. I would photograph my hands and my feet, or I would photograph myself in the mirror.
“When Dylan, my husband, came into the picture, I started photographing him a lot and getting a lot of joy from him. That gave me joy in photographing myself, as he would help me take pictures. Then I really started experimenting and wanting to see what my body looked like when I did stuff. I‘m a heavier person and my body makes all of these shapes that I really enjoy, that other bodies maybe can’t do. I feel like my art should be a little risky – what I mean by that is, I want to give all of myself to my practice.
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Martha Naranjo Sandoval, from Small Death (Mack, 2025)Courtesy of the artist and Mack
“The book features a handful of people: my brother, my mum, my dad, my husband and my cat, if you count the cat as a person. I really like photographing my parents in particular. What I noticed very early on is that they do it not necessarily because they want pictures of themselves or because they understand what I do, although I think my mum understands better, but because they love me.
“One of the big hurdles that I had was how much work I have. I had ten years and 550 rolls to get through. I wanted to talk about my home country. I wanted to talk about the border. I also wanted to talk about the physicality of being a woman, especially a woman that is bigger than most women. I was having a hard time collapsing all of that into one story. Instead, I decided to tell smaller stories that are sewn together.
“There are a lot of reasons why my book is called Small Death, but in some ways you die a little when you emigrate. The person that you were no longer exists. You have to decide what to put in your bags, metaphorically, and what you’re leaving behind. Home and belonging are things that I think about a lot. Trying to define them is like trying to hold something slippery. So much of me being a photographer is trying to grapple with these things.
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Martha Naranjo Sandoval, from Small Death (Mack, 2025)Courtesy of the artist and Mack
“When I just moved here, I was an international student, and I didn’t fully understand what it means to be an immigrant in the way I do now. I moved to the US before Trump ran for president. I still remember when he made that speech on the escalator announcing Mexicans were rapists. Now, we are seeing how much money they’re pouring into ICE to take people away. It’s terrifying. The US depends so much on immigrants and on Mexicans – some of these people work so hard they barely sleep. If there’s anything that I can say with the little platform that I have about this, it is that we should see people as people.”
Small Death by Martha Naranjo Sandoval is published by Mack Books and is out now.