Jeremy Liebman's debut photobook 'Coincidence' explores language loss across three generations

New York-based photographer Jeremy Liebman has published his debut photobook, 'Coincidence', with Apartamento, the magazine whose visual identity he helped shape for a decade. The black-and-white book spans five years of Liebman's life across Dallas, Brooklyn, and the English countryside, capturing candid family moments. It traces the parallel experiences of his father Richard, a photographer diagnosed with Alzheimer's who is losing language, and his two young daughters who are just acquiring it. The 96-page volume includes photographs of holidays, birthday parties, and snow storms, as well as interiors like a living room during Christmas gift unwrapping and a nursing home. Liebman notes that some images were only recognized as significant years later. The sequencing, developed with Apartamento's Nacho and Robbie, creates visual parallels—such as a daughter on a beach opposite a father shielding his eyes from sunlight, both overwhelmed by light but with different emotional tones. The book is not explicitly about dementia or parenthood but about language and the mind's experience when it disappears. Liebman describes a re-immersion into a world of pure inputs as his father lost speech and comprehension, mirroring his daughters' emergence into naming. Objects like a fallen book or resting hand mirror each other across pages, building a visual language of family.