Emily Stein’s Bubblegum gathers film photographs of children blowing bubbles on beaches around the world. The premise is deliberately simple: a familiar childhood act becomes the organising motif for a compact study of play, freedom, innocence, and the pleasures of being young. Across the series, the gum is both subject and device—an instantly legible gesture that gives the images a shared rhythm while leaving room for differences of place, expression, posture, and temperament.

Stein’s use of film lends the photographs a gently nostalgic register, but the work is not simply an exercise in looking back. Its appeal lies in the precision with which ordinary moments are framed: the concentration before a bubble forms, the comic distortion of a face, the suspended instant when an ephemeral object occupies the centre of the image. The pictures retain the spontaneity of children at play while demonstrating a controlled, recognisable photographic eye.

Published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2017, Bubblegum is an art-photography monograph in an accessible hardcover format. Its 88 pages allow the recurring gesture to function as a sequence rather than a single visual joke, encouraging attention to variation and cadence. For collectors, the book is notable for the clarity of its concept and the consistency of its execution: a tightly defined subject opens onto broader questions about childhood and shared experience without requiring explanatory text. Stein’s photographs offer a modest subject, treated with enough formal discipline to sustain repeated looking.