Mark Morrisroe died in 1989, at thirty. The photographs he made between the mid-1970s and the end of that decade have the pressure of work produced quickly and kept deliberately — self-portraits, and portraits of friends, lovers and people close at hand. “I,” published by Twin Palms in 1999, takes that first-person address as its organising principle, and the title is not incidental. Morrisroe appears inside his own pictures and speaks in his own texts, so the book reads less as a survey than as a portrait assembled from the inside.

Its shape is legible from the contents. Some two hundred photographs, the earliest from 1976 and the last from 1988, are printed mostly one to a page in the opening section. The second half changes register: Polaroids, placed two, three or four to a spread, where the smaller format and the instant print’s own colour and cropping become part of the composition. The pacing between the two halves is what holds the volume together, moving from the finished print to the provisional image without treating either as the lesser one.

Morrisroe’s writing appears here alongside the pictures. Klaus Ottmann’s closing essay, “Mark Morrisroe and his works,” and a plate list giving titles and dates supply the sequence with a scholarly floor. Jack Woody — editor and publisher of Twelvetrees Press and Twin Palms — designed the book, and the restraint of the layout lets the images hold their intended scale.

The case for a collector rests on this combination rather than on anything external to the book. Morrisroe’s photographs circulate widely in group contexts and in the company of his contemporaries; what is harder to find is a volume that keeps his own words in the same binding as the images they describe. That pairing alters how the work is read. The tenderness and the self-dramatisation come from his account of them, not from a curator’s. A self-portrait with the artist’s voice left in is a specific and durable thing.