Letters to Azan

Shipping June 2026 

Advance copies at:
AIPAD April 22-26, 2026
ICP May 8-10, 2026

Letters to Azan is a monograph composed of letters, photographs, and ephemera — a quiet archive of motherhood, displacement, and love that persists across distance. Shaped by grief and longing, the book unfolds as a deeply personal narrative of survival and resistance.

The work traces a mother’s passage through geographical, emotional, and legal boundaries, where time stretches and contracts in response to presence and absence. Moments of togetherness feel suspended, while separation carries a different gravity — not only between mother and child, but across generations: one mother parted from her daughter, another navigating that same distance with her own son.

Through image and text, the project reflects on how love adapts, endures, and continues to move even when bodies cannot.

While rooted in the intimate relationship between a mother and her child, Letters to Azan speaks more broadly to those who have lived through loss, migration, and separation — and to the fragile, persistent hope of return — offering a space for recognition, memory, and quiet connection.

Lali Khalid is a visual artist living and working in Chicago. Born and raised in Pakistan, Khalid immigrated to U.S. in 2011. Lali uses her work as a tool to explore themes of diaspora, identity, representation, immigration, and home in her own life and the lives of the people she photographs. Her images depict and document cultural and private conflicts, as well as emotive effects of natural light, through quiet, narrative allusions.

Authors: Lali Khalid
Design: Caleb Cain Marcus, Luminosity Lab

ISBN: 978-1-959684-14-5
Dimensions: 6.7 x 9.5 inches
Number of pages: 144 pages
Binding: Hardcover Swiss