Michael Sherwin’s Vanishing Points is anchored in specific American places: sacred landforms, earthworks, documented archaeological sites, and battlegrounds where histories remain contested. Developed as a long-term photographic project, the book studies landscapes marked by Indigenous presence even when that presence is no longer readily visible. Its title names both an optical condition and a historical one—the point at which lines meet, and a place where cultures converge.
Sherwin brings together large-format landscape photographs and smaller still lifes of objects gathered at the sites. The change in scale establishes a productive tension between territory and fragment, distant view and material trace. A landscape may appear quiet or ordinary, yet its historical meaning alters the act of looking; an isolated object, in turn, can register as evidence of human activity without supplying a complete account. The photographs ask the reader to attend to what remains while recognizing how much has disappeared.
The project also turns its archaeological perspective toward the present. In considering the sparse traces of once-vibrant Indigenous cultures, Sherwin asks what monuments contemporary society is creating and what future excavations might disclose about our own time on Earth. This movement between ancestral history and anticipated ruin gives the work its conceptual reach: the sites are not presented solely as remnants of a closed past, but as prompts for thinking about cultural memory, occupation, and erasure.
Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021, Vanishing Points belongs in a serious photobook collection for the disciplined relationship it constructs between landscape photography, historical geography, and still life. Its significance does not depend on spectacle. It rests instead on the sustained attention given to places whose visible surfaces cannot contain their histories, and on the book’s pairing of expansive views with intimate evidence. That structure rewards close rereading and places Sherwin’s work within broader photographic debates about land, memory, and the limits of representation.
