Uncle Charlie by Marc Asnin

Marc Asnin is a Brooklyn-born photographer who grew up in the borough he has spent a career documenting, developing his eye as a child through his father, an advertising photographer, and refining it over decades of work that has earned him the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the Mother Jones Documentary Award, the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and the Robert F. Kennedy Photography Award. He has taught at the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Uncle Charlie is the culmination of eleven years spent photographing Asnin’s own uncle, a man who grew up in the same household as Asnin’s mother, but never found his way out. Charlie and his five children, Charles, Joe, Brian, Mary, and Jamie, lived together in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The book is the story of Charlie’s tattoos, his guns, his unemployment, his illness, his poverty, and his drug problems, but also of the complicated and unresolvable love of a nephew for the man who is both his godfather and a cautionary tale. Published by Contrasto, it is a landmark of long-form documentary photography from New York, recognized with the Robert F. Kennedy Photography Award in 2013.

de.MO designed the book, documentary photography book design for a project of extraordinary intimacy, bringing considered design to a body of work built over more than a decade of access, trust, and unflinching observation.