From Our House to Your House gathers American Christmas cards amassed by Martin Parr, drawing on the same collecting habit that produced Boring Postcards and its companions. The photographs here were not made by Parr; they are family portraits, mailed greetings in which parents, children and household pets assemble before the camera to announce themselves to relatives and friends across the country. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2002, the book sets eighty such images across ninety-six hardback pages in a compact square format of roughly seventeen centimetres.

The interest lies in what these pictures cannot help revealing. Posed with equal measures of pride and awkwardness, each family presents an image of itself for circulation, and the repetition of that gesture across the country turns private ceremony into a kind of public record. Christmas, domesticity, prosperity and belonging are all being staged, and the staging is visible. Parr’s role is that of an editor and collector rather than an author of the pictures, and the selection, sequencing and design of the book shape how the material reads: affection and comedy sit alongside something stranger, a portrait of a nation picturing itself at a fixed point in the year.

Collectors drawn to Parr’s publishing output will recognise the continuity here with his other projects, and this title belongs in that context. The book’s relevance rests on the questions it opens about vernacular photography, family self-representation and the use of the camera as a social instrument, not on scarcity or print history.