It Was Once My Universe – Marie Tomanová

In one way or another, we all leave home and look back with wordless wonder. Thank god there are artists like Marie Tomanova that can encapsulate the ruthless beauty of this rear-view canyon.
                                                                                   —Alec Soth

Marie Tomanova launches her new book It Was Once My Universe in Tokyo in September and in New York City in October 2022. Intimate and vulnerable, it is about her return home as a different person after a long period away, and the documentation of that dizzying experience. The photographs in It Was Once My Universe were created between December 16, 2018 and January 5, 2019 during Tomanova’s first return home in over eight long years to her small family farm in Mikulov, Czech Republic.

It Was Once My Universe is almost the other side of Tomanova’s critically acclaimed Young American (2019) and New York New York (2021), books about coming to the United States and finding her identity and celebrating that of others. It Was Once My Universe is about returning home and feeling lost. It is about being in-between.