Tallott started making photocopied zines, and you can feel that DIY spirit in this book. At its center is a page filled with scans of handwritten aphorisms—the beating heart of the sequence. These are phrases his mum would say while he was in recovery: The sun will always rise in the morning; I’ll love you until the world stops going round. “Foreverisms, juxtaposed with the meaninglessness of life,” he muses. “Big promises of eternal love, but also reminders that you’ve always got tomorrow, don’t worry, it’s nothing, life’s temporary.” Tallott scrawled these lines repeatedly, as though burning them into actuality. “Calling them mantras sounds like a lot for what my mum was saying over a cup of tea, but it’s just good, honest stuff to live by.”

The artist is just one year out of his photography degree at Camberwell College of Arts, and last month, he was named Photo London’s Emerging Photographer of the Year. How does it feel to see early success with such an intimate series? “Pretty mental to be honest,” he reflects. “It’s not something you’d say to a stranger at the pub. Sometimes I wake up and it feels freeing. But other times…” It’s emotional for his loved ones, too: “It’s been difficult for my mum, especially when I’m talking about the book because it came from such a dark time. But in the end, the whole point of it is understanding life’s temporality, and learning to deal with its ebbs and flows.”