In 2022, MACK issued Gathered Leaves Annotated, a 720-page paperback by Alec Soth. It is not a conventional retrospective. The book reproduces every spread from five of Soth’s earlier publications—Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara, Broken Manual, Songbook, and A Pound of Pictures—and surrounds them with annotations, notes, text extracts, and additional photographs. A new introduction by the artist opens the volume. The whole is printed on newspaper and bound with a fold-out map jacket, at 21.5 by 26 centimeters.

The format is deliberately dense. Where the original Gathered Leaves appeared as a box set accompanying Soth’s 2015 touring exhibition, this single volume reimagines that project as a compact roadmap through his work. The annotations do not merely caption; they show sources, adjacent images, and lines of thought, allowing a reader to see how sequences were built and revised. Newspaper printing gives the pages a serial, disposable texture that sits oddly and productively against the care of the sequencing.

Across the five books, Soth’s concerns remain consistent: the American road, the lyric and the unflinching, the act of picture-making itself. Sleeping by the Mississippi established his elegiac tone; Niagara, Broken Manual, and Songbook extended it; A Pound of Pictures, from the same year as this collection, returns to the road-trip structure with a new poetic register. Gathered Leaves Annotated makes those continuities visible. It is as much a study of the photobook as a form as it is a survey of American idiosyncrasy.

For a collector, the appeal is practical and historical. The annotated edition gathers five bodies of work in one accessible paperback, with material that distinguishes it from the earlier box set. It accompanied solo exhibitions at Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich and The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, in Japan, both in 2022. It offers a working reference for anyone interested in how Soth constructs his books—not a trophy object, but a detailed, usable document of a major photographer’s practice.