A Parallel Road begins where many American road stories begin, on the open highway, and then declines the romance. Amani Willett’s 112-page paperback, published by Overlapse in 2020, takes as its subject the Black experience of driving in the United States across roughly eighty-five years — a history in which the road has repeatedly been marked by fear, violence and death.

Willett assembles the book from several kinds of pictures at once. Archival material, news imagery and newly made photographs are layered page upon page, so that no single image is asked to carry the argument alone. The Negro Motorist Green Book, the mid-century directory that told Black travellers where they might safely stop, eat or sleep, recurs as a coordinate rather than a prop; the question the book keeps asking is how long the road will remain a site of violence and oppression for Black Americans. Family photographs also enter the sequence, and the effect is accumulative rather than documentary.

What the book argues against is familiar: the American ideal of the road trip, sustained for a century by photography, literature and advertising. Against that inheritance Willett sets an account of movement that is cautious, negotiated, sometimes fatal. The layering is not decoration; it is the method. One image sits beside another, a document beside a recollection, until the freedom the highway promises reads as a privilege unevenly granted.

For a collector, the appeal is partly a matter of physical modesty and partly of structural ambition. At roughly 13 by 17 centimetres, this is a compact, unassuming paperback — reviewers have treated it as an object made to be handled and passed around rather than kept under glass. Its complexity lives in the editing and sequencing, and in the range of material Willett orchestrates. Anyone building a shelf around contemporary American photography, the politics of travel, or the photobook as an argument rather than a portfolio will find it unusually concentrated.