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 comprised of letters, photographs, and ephemera—a quiet archive of motherhood, displacement, and love that perseveres 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 journey through geographical, emotional, and legal boundaries, where time stretches and contracts depending on one’s perspective. Intervals of togetherness appear suspended, and separation holds yet another weight—not only between mother and child, but crossing generations. Through image and text, the book reflects on how love adapts and endures, even when bodies cannot.

While rooted in an intimate bond between a mother and her son, Letters to Azan speaks broadly to anyone who has experienced loss, migration and separation, all the while grasping on the fragile hope of return.

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.

Author: 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