Trust collects ninety colour photographs by Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg, both of whom had worked on the editorial staff of Colors, the magazine founded by Benetton, and who were living and working in London when the book appeared. Westzone published it in 2001. The subject is a particular kind of situation: a person hands over control. A body on a treatment table; a face in a dentist’s chair; a woman in a beauty clinic who might be asleep or anaesthetized; a man so absorbed in a video game that his stillness resembles prayer. In each case attention, consciousness or physical care has been entrusted to someone else, and the camera studies what that entrusting looks like.

Chanarin and Broomberg came to the project from magazine editorial work, and the sequence shows it. The pictures are arranged as an argument rather than a portfolio; the tension comes from adjacency, from the way a clinical setting rhymes with a devotional one, a gym with a surgery. Little is explained in words. The photographs are asked to carry the thinking on their own.

Many of the images had a life before the book. Photographs from the Trust series were shown at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, and further exhibitions were planned for the National Museum of Film & Photography in Bradford and the Hasselblad Centre in Sweden. That itinerary places the work on a line running from picture journalism toward the gallery wall and the printed page — a useful context for a book that sits at that crossing.

For a collector, the argument rests on subject and method rather than on any claim about scarcity. It is a hardcover volume of 144 pages, printed in colour, and it belongs to a period when photographers trained in the picture press began to treat the book as a place to make a long argument. The scenes it records — the small, repeated acts of deference on which ordinary life depends — have not dated. If anything, they read more sharply now.