I Want to Always Be with You by Cemre Yeşil Gönenli

I Want to Always Be with You is a photobook that contemplates sleep as a way of coming to terms with death’s silent finality. The book unfolds as a quiet dialogue between a father and a daughter, carried across time through photography.

The work brings together photographs that were never meant to meet: images taken by the artist’s father and printed in a darkroom in the 1970s, photographs made by the artist herself in the 2020s, and the family archive. Made across 50 years, these images become a transgenerational encounter— not as a linear narrative, but as a dream sequence shared between a father and his children.

Sleep becomes the state through which this encounter takes place. A shared sleep. A place to dive. Throughout the book, sleep functions as a recurring metaphor— a site of safety, vulnerability, and surrender. At its core, the book addresses the fragile tension between tenderness and unease— the sweetness of sleep set against the unknown of death. The work lingers on the paradox of that primal, intoxicating love and pain within a family — the ache of a love still rooted in truth, yet tainted by its own poison.  The book holds a space to confront the silence between estranged parents and their children, followed by death. This deeply intimate work stems from the artist’s confrontation with mortality—her father’s sudden passing from an aortic rupture, and her brother’s narrow escape from the exact same fate. 

Boyhood manifests as a form of legacy. A masculine love between boys and dads and all the power struggles. Boys who carried one another- on shoulders, through silence, into sleep. Boys who wanted to fly high and to play, no matter what. These gestures echo across generations, bringing fathers, sons, and daughters into a shared emotional terrain. A visual take on how things suddenly go wrong when a man feels he is losing power—castration anxiety, perhaps even with a trace of the famous Oedipus complex.

Rather than seeking resolution, I Want to Always Be with You stays with what cannot be healed. It is a book about holding on and letting go at the same time. About remaining together, even in states of unconsciousness. About learning to live with death’s quiet finality — not by overcoming it, but by resting beside it.

Light keeps time.

Darkness keeps bodies.

A bed remembers what photographs cannot.

Here, nothing is resolved.