Thin Coffee and Secondhand Smoke

Candace Doyal has created a body of work that cuts you open with its honesty. Melding documentary, visual and written commentary, and fine art photography, Doyal painstakingly recreates scenes from her family's searing history of addiction and incarceration, often using her own body as a stand-in for her mother in scenes simultaneously remembered and re-imagined.

With echoes of Nan Goldin and Duane Michals, Doyal's eerie and beautiful tableaux, coupled with her own writing that illuminates each image, will haunt you with their unflinching gaze into the heart of addiction, even as the photographer has laid her own road out, by the act of their creation.

Doyal’s images and texts are supplemented by actual letters sent from prison by her mother, which include incisive and poignant writing about the impact of addiction-fueled criminal behavior and incarceration on the parent-child relationship.

Thin Coffee and Secondhand Smoke is a work of anger and loss, heartbreak and sorrow, survival, endurance, and renewal. The creation of the work was integral to the artist's own escape from the cycle that had defined her youth. It is a work of power, a story that matters, and one that can make a difference.

As Jen Graves wrote in The Stranger:

All children of addicts are forced to perform some version of reenactment. Many of us are performance artists all the time, trying on the various roles in our families, as in Doyal's photographs, to discover what combination of empathy, rejection, forgetting, and remembering will sustain our health.

A powerful work of loss and the struggle to heal through the creative process.

Published August, 2023

Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-63398-145-4