Donna Ferrato | HOLY

* Winner of the 2021 Lucie Photo Book Prize for Best Single-Author Independent Publication *

Over the last 50 years, I’ve been driven to photograph the wisdom and courage of women: their mentality, their sexuality, their emotionality, their spirituality.

HOLY is the most important book I have ever done. It's about the unleashed power of women. What women have gained over the last 50 years. The hard-won freedom that women are losing. Why every woman's autonomy is sacrosanct.

My stepdaughter, feminist writer Kat Holden, inspired me to honor the full dimension of women's lives by bringing my most powerful photographs together in one book:

“I can't think of any photojournalist who has documented the extremes of human passion more intensively and extensively than Donna. No one has better captured the 360º picture of walking this Earth as a female. There used to be a time when her study of women was split: over here, the 'domestic violence' work, and over here, the 'sex' work. The combination of the two is vital. It's only in this combination that we see the whole spectrum—the truth of what it is to be a woman. The contradictions we are expected to embody: the virgin and the whore, the vulnerable and the invincible, the mother and the daughter." —Katherine Holden

No expense has been spared. My writing, my thoughts, my feelings are all immersed in this book. Each page is handmade and captured by the finest duotone. Each edge is engine red. Each caption is handwritten. It's a true labor of love—about love—and the unassailable Mother of God-given rights of each and every woman.