Published by Prestel in 2023, Micaiah Carter’s debut monograph, What’s My Name, places portraiture at the meeting point of contemporary youth culture, fashion, fine art, and street style. Its central concerns are identity and representation, approached not as abstractions but through the presence of individual sitters. Carter photographs celebrities, musicians, and members of his own family with the same insistence on personhood, allowing style to frame character rather than overwhelm it.

The work is especially attentive to Black life and familial connection. Carter’s subjects appear composed yet unguarded, and the photographs balance editorial precision with emotional proximity. Lighting is deliberate but restrained; color carries atmosphere without becoming merely decorative. This control gives the portraits their distinctive tension: they are highly constructed images in which the people depicted still seem fully in possession of themselves.

The title poses a question about recognition—who is named, how identity is spoken, and who controls the terms of visibility. Across Carter’s portrait and fashion practice, representation becomes both an aesthetic problem and a social act. The photographs resist reducing their subjects to symbols, instead preserving specificity, dignity, and the textures of kinship and contemporary self-fashioning.

At 224 pages, the hardcover offers collectors a substantial introduction to Carter’s photographic language and to the connections he draws among family, Blackness, youth, and image-making. Its significance does not depend on claims of scarcity: as a debut monograph, it establishes an early book-length account of a practice that crosses commissioned fashion imagery and intimate portraiture. For collections concerned with contemporary portraiture, fashion photography, or changing forms of representation, What’s My Name provides a focused and consequential point of reference.