Desire Lines takes its title from the paths people wear into the ground by walking them, and Lara Shipley applies that idea to the Sonoran desert where the borders of the United States and Mexico meet. Published in 2023 by Overlapse, the book follows routes through that landscape — older ones and newer ones, among them the routes taken by migrants — and treats each as a mark left by movement rather than as an abstraction drawn on a map.

Shipley’s photographs are set alongside written material, historical as well as contemporary, so the book argues by accumulation: migration as something humans have always done, and as a force that has shaped both the geopolitical order and the particular terrain in question. The approach is deliberative. Rather than pressing a single conclusion, the sequence opens room for a slower consideration of immigration, one that keeps the desert, its crossings and their histories in the same frame.

The object itself is modest and precise: a paperback of 208 pages, roughly 14 by 21.5 cm, section-sewn and OTA-bound with printed paper covers. The scale suits the reading — pictures held close, text that interrupts and extends them — and the binding is the kind that lies open and survives return visits.

For collectors, the case rests less on scarcity than on position. Overlapse has assembled a deliberate photobook list, and Desire Lines sits within it as a book about a specific and heavily contested geography, made with the means of both photography and documents. It belongs on shelves where borderland photography, migration as subject matter and the hybrid image-and-text photobook are already of interest; it is a title to read against the work it answers, and to keep for the questions it declines to close.