The Canary and The Hammer takes gold as its subject — not the metal’s gleam so much as the systems built around it. Lisa Barnard photographed across four years and four continents, and the resulting book, her third, was published by MACK in 2019.

The project grew out of the financial crisis of 2008 and the renewed faith in gold it exposed. Barnard tracks the mineral’s double life: a substance buried inside the phones, computers and instruments of contemporary life, and a durable emblem of beauty, purity, greed and political power. Running alongside that enquiry is a second one, aimed at photography itself — what the medium can credibly do with events as abstract as speculation and currency.

The book moves among histories that rarely share a page. The mania of the gold rush. The labour and landscapes of industrial mining. The sexual politics that organise the industry. Gold’s indispensable, often unacknowledged place in high technology. Photographs are set beside text and archival material, so that the sequence reads less as a survey than as an argument assembled from fragments, and as a record of a personal route through the material.

The object has been considered with equal care: a silkscreened hardcover wrapped in Japanese paper, 200 pages at 20 x 29 cm, issued in September 2019. Its interest for a collection rests in that pairing of ambition and control — a documentary subject pursued across continents, and a sustained test of whether photography can register forces it cannot picture directly. Barnard’s earlier books established her as an artist who works this way; here the stakes of the method are at their highest, which is reason enough to keep the volume within reach rather than on a shelf.

Readers who follow how contemporary photobooks handle research, industry and finance will find this one unusually complete in its thinking.