Join us for a conversation between artists Pia-Paulina Guilmoth and Balarama Heller, discussing their recent publications: Flowers Drink the River, published by STANLEY/BARKER, and Sacred Place, published by TIS Books. Guilmoth and Heller will look at overlapping interests in the work as storytellers whose photographs offer such poignant entry points into dreamlike and spiritual worlds in very different ways.
The two works were both shortlisted titles from the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, currently on view as part of a presentation at Printed Matter.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River reveals a rural landscape where mud, earth and stone envelop, and the forest floors are wet with glowing dew. Using a large format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds an entrancing, mystical presence in her daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers of her home. Pia’s hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended mid-ritual.
Balarama Heller’s Sacred Place was created in the predawn hours, when the veil between the spiritual and material realms is thinnest. It is a deeply personal yet universally resonant pilgrimage exploring faith, memory, and spiritual transformation. Born into the Hare Krishna movement in America, Balarama Heller grew up within a world of devotion, ritual, and upheaval—moving through communes, countercultures, and moments of both transcendence and disillusionment. Returning to Vrindavan, India, the heart of the religion, Heller, guided by Joseph Campbell’s idea that sacred places reveal “eternity shining through time,” crafts an alchemical tapestry of archetypes both ancient and new.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth was born in rural New Hampshire in 1993. She lives and makes art in rural central Maine in Franklin County.
Pia is a working-class transgender woman who lives with her partner and two cats in a 200 year old shoe factory on the edge of the Sandy River. In her free time she likes to lay in the dirt, hold her friends, and trespass into abandoned houses and barns. Pia’s photography is foremost about harnessing beauty as a form of survival.
Pia Paulina Guilmoth lives and makes art in rural central Maine. She uses a 4x5 camera and other experimental analogue techniques in her practice. Her work is foremost about beauty, and her experience as a trans woman in the small working class town she lives in. Her work is held in the permanent collection at SFMOMA. Pia released her third book in November 2024 with Stanley/Barker titled Flowers Drink the River which received the Jury’s Special Mention for the 2025 Paris-Aperture Book of the Year award. In 2024 / 2025 she had two major solo exhibitions open in London, and New York City with CLAMP Gallery, and Webber Gallery. In 2024 she won a Google/Aperture Creator Labs grant, and a Peter Reed Foundation grant in photography, and In 2022 she was a MacDowell Fellow in Visual. Pia’s fourth book, a collaborative project with Jesse Bull Saffire titled Fishworm, was published with Void at the end of 2025. In the spring of 2026 Pia will present at the next Forum on Contemporary Photography at MOMA.
Balarama Heller (b. 1979, New York) is a New York City-based transmedium visual artist whose work explores the intersection of spirituality, myth, ritual, and science. Working between abstraction and representational spaces, Heller’s practice reimagines archetypal symbols, creating a visual language of preverbal awareness and photographic sublimation.
After receiving his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2001 and working at Magnum Photos, Heller joined the U.S. Merchant Marines before relocating to Istanbul to document ritual and ascension throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He returned to New York in 2010.
Recent group exhibitions include Illuminations, curated by Dana Karwas at Yale University’s CCAM (2025), and Poetic Record, curated by Deana Lawson and Michael Famighetti at Princeton University (2024).
The 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards is an annual celebration of the photobook’s enduring role within the evolving narrative of photography. Now in its thirteenth year, the awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year. The shortlist jury was comprised of Brendan Embser, senior editor, Aperture; Florian Koenigsberger, technologist and photographer; Paul Moakley, executive producer, The New Yorker; Anna Planas, artistic director, Paris Photo; and Keisha Scarville, artist.
