This collection of photographs presents the world I know—the complicated, mad world that includes my father, mother, brother, sister, friends, dogs, babies, extended families and the stuff of life. There are no pictures of the land, only the landscape where they set themselves loose and live with their pleasures and troubles, and with themselves and each other.’

Holy Cow! is a romp through 20 years of family photographs by Melonie Bennett. The black and white images in this unconventional family album were made between 1990-2011. They depict the rituals, traditions, dramas, laughter, gatherings, the dogs and the drunken exploits alongside quieter moments of reprieve—they show the rollercoaster of human life.

Bennett and her siblings grew up on a dairy farm and although the family lived under constant stress, they coped by laughing, eating, fighting then talking and pretending everything was okay. She has always been drawn to photograph the absurd and unexpected—a dog wearing cowboy boots, boys playing cards in bras, going home at 2am after a moose hunt, college kids streaking through the farmland and the juxtaposition of pregnant and beer bellies. Humour and irony were highly prized in the Bennett household,giving relief from a daunting heaviness. Intertwined with the photographs are recollections and stories by the photographer’s brother, Merritt.

Melonie Bennett (1969) lives and works in Maine. She graduated from Maine College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Degree in Photography and began work as assistant to the photographer Judy Glickman Lauder in 1991.Photographs from Holy Cow! appear alongside work by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Susan Meiselas and Gordon Parks amongst others in the forthcoming major travelling exhibition PRESENCE: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder co-organised by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, and the American Federation of Arts, New York.

Holy Cow! will be Bennett’s first monograph.