Phil Jung’s first monograph, Windscreen, takes as its subject the interiors of used American cars, photographed where they sit on city streets. Published by TBW Books in 2022, the book positions the viewer outside looking in: these are spaces that belong neither fully to the public realm nor to any private owner, and much of their force comes from that ambiguity. Jung’s camera records worn upholstery, accumulated grime, frost, dead insects, and the things people leave behind—empty Carlton cigarette packs, a broken frame around a digital Van Gogh, a Ouija board planchette. Assembled across the sequence, these details amount to portraits without sitters, evidence of lives that have passed through but remain unseen. At times an obstruction on the glass, or a disembodied hand entering the frame, reminds us that looking is not innocent.

The photographs were made on Kodak 4×5 sheet film, and the large format matters. Jung’s use of color and composition is deliberate and exacting, so that grime and frost can read as color-field abstraction while a cigarette packet or a shattered frame retains the specificity of an object someone once touched. The book’s scale—roughly sixteen by thirteen inches, casebound with a tip-on cover, fifty-six pages carrying twenty-six color plates—gives the images room to operate at a scale close to the windows themselves.

What distinguishes Windscreen from other inventories of American roadside decay is its refusal of easy nostalgia. Jung treats these car interiors as a social landscape, and the poetry of the book lies in how cautiously it approaches the people who are absent from it. For a collector interested in contemporary American photography, in the book as a sequenced object, or in work that thinks carefully about the ethics of looking through a window, this is a considered and durable addition.