Joakim Möller’s “017” arrives as the seventeenth entry in Setanta Books’ bi-monthly series devoted to emerging photographers, a context that shapes how the book asks to be read. The series format is a constraint as much as a platform: each title is a compact softcover, and Möller’s runs forty-eight pages at roughly 21 by 16 centimeters, with a card wraparound cover. That scale suits a body of work built from accumulation rather than argument, where individual images are less important than the drift they create together.
The photographs come from a daily, almost involuntary practice. Möller describes leaving home and returning with a memory card full of pictures, trying to go out without a camera and coming back with a phone full of images instead. He calls the results a visual diary, and resists assigning them a political or philosophical program. What drives the work, in his account, is curiosity — following a stranger for several blocks, or waiting out reflections in a car window until the sun goes down — and an attraction to the mystery hidden among mundane things.
That stated refusal of a thesis is itself the book’s subject. Möller writes that he does not know what he is looking for and hopes never to find out, and the sequence reads accordingly: observation without resolution, attention sustained past the point where a caption or concept would normally step in. For a photographer working at this scale, the discipline lies in trusting the ordinary to hold.
Collectors following Setanta’s series will recognize “017” as part of a deliberate run — the catalogue lists prior titles by Luka Khabelashvili, Margaret Durow, Michael McCluskey, Hollie Fernando, Dino Kuznik, Lauren Tepfer, Natalie Christensen and others — which gives the book a place in a sequence as well as a standalone identity. The edition is 350 copies; a special edition adds a numbered Giclée print from an edition of twenty-five with a signed artist label. For readers drawn to diaristic, curiosity-led photography, this is a restrained and considered example.
