Vanishing by Anna Arendt

Copies will be here on Thursday, shipping on Friday

Anna Arendt’s debut monograph, Vanishing, etched in ghostly black and white, evokes a world of dreamlike dread and fragile beauty.

Born in the former German Democratic Republic, Arendt was 24 when the Berlin Wall fell; her daughter was two. Her parents, both born in 1940, were wartime children. Her grandfathers served as soldiers stationed in Poland between 1940 and 1942. One returned two years after the war; the other never came home. Years later, Arendt learned her husband’s father, photographer Sid Grossman, had roots in the same region of Poland where her grandfathers had been deployed.

As a child, she discovered a hidden shelf filled with family photo albums. “That’s where I first understood the power of an image,” she recalls. “A photo from the summer of 1940—my grandmother, her baby, and my grandfather in uniform—still stirs deeply conflicted emotions.”

Over 15 years, Arendt traced those familial echoes across Germany and Poland. Her work slips through time like blood memory: forests thick with shadow, wolves circling in the dark, a daughter becoming a mother, becoming a grandmother, becoming a child again. Haunted villages emerge; souls flicker on the edge of forgetting. The brutal past merges with luminous moments that seem torn from a Grimm tale.

Vanishing is a vivid meditation on how beauty and brutality intertwine—in both man and beast.