But Still, It Turns takes its title from the words Galileo is said to have murmured after withdrawing his account of a moving Earth. Paul Graham borrows that stubbornness for photography: a way of staying with the world as it is without pretending to command it.

The book gathers eight bodies of work, among them Gregory Halpern’s Californian sequence ZZYZX, Vanessa Winship’s she dances on Jackson, Curran Hatleberg’s Lost Coast, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s One Wall a Web, Richard Choi’s What Remains, RaMell Ross’s South County, the collaborative project Index G by Emanuele Bruti and Piergiorgio Casotti, and Kristine Potter’s Manifest. They are not presented as a survey or a school. Graham sets them in what the book describes as harmony and enlightening dissonance, and the result is a curatorial argument about what photographs can do now.

Graham’s position is neither studio artifice nor conventional documentary. The work he chooses tells open-ended stories that shift, warp and branch, tuned to life as it is lived. The phrase he uses—all the world’s infinite consanguinity—points to a kinship among images and subjects that resists neat resolution. Essays by Graham, Rebecca Bengal, RaMell Ross and Ian Penman extend the thinking beyond the plates.

MACK published the book in February 2021 in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, New York, running from 4 February to 9 May 2021. It is a debossed linen hardback of 268 pages, 23.5 by 28.7 centimetres. For collectors, its interest lies less in any single photographer’s hand than in the editorial frame: a considered response to a moment in photographic practice, carried as much by sequence, design and accompanying writing as by the individual projects it collects.