On the front cover of Jeremy Liebman’s new photobook, Coincidence, is a close-range image of his elderly father and his toddler daughter, both gazing at an unknown entity beyond the frame. Rendered in black and white, the difference between them is striking: Liebman senior is unshaven, his expression unfocused. The baby has smooth, plump cheeks and is engrossed by whatever it is she sees. “There’s wonder in their eyes,”, says Liebman. “Except, it’s not as rosy as that. As she was developing language, my dad was losing it.”
‘Wonder in their eyes’: the book charts the Liebmans’ life across the generations
Coincidence follows three generations of Liebmans over five years, together and apart. Jeremy’s father, the American photographer Richard Liebman, was living with dementia, while Jeremy and his partner raised their two small daughters. Each picture occupies a single page and each spread shows the small symmetry of their domestic lives. One shows Liebman’s partner and baby lying on a sofa, post-breastfeed. On the opposite page, Liebman’s mum drapes her arm around his dad’s frail shoulders, her head resting gently on his. “Whether it’s nursing a child or someone at the end of their life,” says Liebman, “connectedness, responsibility and mothering is universal.”
Richard Liebman died in November 2025. In an Instagram post, Liebman wrote of his father’s “overlooked” love. “To him, these [moments] were worth separating and elevating from the background noise of existence.” This book achieves the same. “A coincidence is something worth noting in the course of your daily life. The images are happenstance, but memorializing them pulls them outside that flow of time.”
Coincidence is published by Apartamento
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