Danielle L. Goldstein began Transience fourteen years ago in an ancient hotel room in Spain. The room felt haunted, and she started thinking about the many souls that had previously inhabited it; she wanted to record both the physical and the metaphorical space.

In 2017 personal upheaval, through separation and divorce, transformed the project's meaning. The earlier frames, impersonal and carefully composed, reflected the order and surface perfection of her life then, while the later ones caught her palpable pain. In the years that followed, joy returned to the work, revealing how the collection had unconsciously documented a midlife journey through turbulence and rebirth. Supplemented with intimate essays written by her daughter, it is a testimony of conquering despair.