NANCY RACINA LANDIN
Book Covers
2025
Landin's image featured on the cover of Christine Estima's novel, Letters to Kafka - published in September 2025.
"In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual."
2025
Landin's imagery appears on the cover of Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior: Stories reissued in July 2025 by Vintage Contemporaries.
"Utterly unsentimental, Gaitskill is ... glorious."
-- The New York Times Book Review
2020
Landin's imagery featured on the paperback reissue of The Story of a New Name, an international bestseller by Elena Ferrante -- published November 2020.
"A story of both a predicted extinction and a form of rebirth."
-- Causette
“Allison Amend is a gifted storyteller whose view of contempory life is wonderfully acute, original, and surprising”.
—Allison Lurie, author of Women and Ghosts and The Last Resort
Things That Pass For Love … October 2008
2016
Imagery from Landin's series "Silenzio" appears on the cover of Grace, a title by Natashia Deón - published June 14.
"With her debut novel …Natashia Deón has announced herself beautifully and distinctively. Her emotional range spans several octaves. She writes with her nerves, generating terrific suspense …"
— Jennifer Senior. The New York Times.
2014
Landin's imagery appears on the cover of Louise Erdrich's book, L'Enfant de la prochaine aurore -- published September 2014.
"A story of both a predicted extinction and a form of rebirth."
-- Causette
2013
​​​Landin's imagery appears on the cover of Magnificence, a title by Lydia Millet - finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - published November 11.
"Warm, moving, funny; Millet's lush prose has you in her thrall from the start." — Jenny Hendrix. Boston Globe.
2013
Imagery from Landin's "Nuovo" series is featured on the April 9th debut of Roberge's The Cost of Living.
"Roberge's writing is both drop-dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart. The Cost of Living is an intimate, original, important novel that I'll be recommending for years to come."
— Cheryl Strayed, best-selling author of "Wild" (Oprah's Book Club selection)
Landin's imagery appeared on two foreign language titles: Jusque dans nos bras by author Alice Zeniter published March 3, 2010 and En La Guarida Del Zorro by Charlotte Link published March 10, 2015.
2012
Landin's imagery is featured on the October 23rd debut of American Ghost by author Janis Owens.
"American Ghost … is a complex and compulsively readable novel about love and identity" — Publisher Scribner/Simon and Schuster, October 9, 2012.
2011
Landin's imagery featured on the September 1, 2011 Random House UK imprint of Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient
"Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of the civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka sent by an international human rights group as a forensic anthropologist to investigate the campaigns of organised slaughter engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past - a story driven by a riveting mystery." -- The Random House Group
2008
Landin's imagery featured on the cover of Allison Amend's award-winning, short story collection Things That Pass for Love -- published September 1, 2008
“Allison Amend is a gifted storyteller whose view of contempory life is wonderfully acute, original, and surprising”.
—Allison Lurie, author of Women and Ghosts and The Last Resort
Things That Pass For Love … October 2008
Publications, Articles & Awards
Landin's work featured by Millennium Images for National Women's Day ​​
2021
2009
COLOR Magazine—Special Issue --- Portfolio Contest Winners—Merit Award
Issue no. 4
November 2009
2005
B&W ANNUAL 2005—Single Image Contest Award
Portraiture/Children
Merit Award Mistero 1
Metaphor/Abstract
Merit Award Mistero 24
2003
B&W Magazine—February, Issue 23—Cover and Spotlight article
"Seen in B&W Magazine for the first time by a large audience, her work builds on the spectral and lyrical traditions of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Francesca Woodman, expressing the purely internal in haunting images that make the inner experience of solitude indelibly visible." -- B&W Magazine, Issue No.23, February 2003
Although photography is, as critic Rosalind Krauss puts it, the “quintessentially realist medium,” there has always been a place for photographic works that speak not of the verifiably real, but of dreams and visions, what Surrealist Andre Breton called the “purely internal.” Chicago photographer Nancy Landin, with her subtle, haunting, marvelously textured images, stands proudly in this tradition, of inner experience made indelibly visible.
1998
NEWCITY, March 12, “Shows To See Now” Artemisia Gallery
Twenty-three black-and-white images explore the limits of New Age spirituality and the significance of symbolic objects —eggs, stars, conch shells—to the artist’s children.
New Age spirituality, a major tendency in contemporary photography, is brought to one of its limits in Nancy Landin’s twenty-three black-and-white images of her young Eurasian son and daughter posing with symbolic objects, such as cups, conch shells, eggs, candles, sticks and especially five-pointed stars. Landin’s photos are not portraits, but records of significant gestures, such as offerings, libations, salutes and prayerful meditations, from a nonexistent religion. Her children do not assert individuality against the generic meanings that Landin has programmed into her vignettes, but seem willingly to acquiesce in the role of archetypes. In the show’s best image, the only one that breaks with tranquility, Landin’s daughter, wearing a slightly parted white blouse, holds her hand over her breast below a broken starfish resting on her chest.
1994
Chicago Reader, “On Exhibit: 20 small stories about Nancy Landin” by Fred Camper
Nancy Landin calls her current series of photographs “Small Stories,” because many of them suggest “magical” tales to her. Her subjects are mysterious and suggestive: some leaves on a wall, a broken window, an indistinct nude in gentle light. The colors are soft, supple, sensual, with none of the glossy assertiveness of much conventional color photography—a result of the unusual process she uses to print them.
Read the entire article​​​​​
1994
NEWCITY, August 12—“Hearts and Bones” Artemisia Gallery
“Hearts and Bones” silver gelatin portraits of young girls and women.
In “Hearts and Bones,” her moving photographic series of funerary statues of women, Nancy Landin “sees the world of women through a lens of unresolved sorrow.” Taken close up, in clear but not sharp black-and-white, Landin’s subjects float in an uncertain zone between flesh and stone. The faces on the statues are reposeful yet deeply expressive of grief. They eternalize mourning. In one remarkable shot, Landin breaks the peace of sadness with a wild Gothic gesture, capturing herself in a graveyard, dressed in black, seizing the back of a stone angel suspended from a cross. Landin’s face wears the same expression of tranquil agony that appears on funerary statues, but she makes sure that she cannot be confused with a piece of sculpture. Does this refusal to identify signal romantic hope or stoical despair?
-- Michael Weinstein