Ken Ohara’s *With* was published by Twin Palms Publishers in July 2006 as a hardcover book. The publisher lists it at 8 by 10 inches, with 148 pages and 133 duotone plates. Across the sequence, the portraits share one demanding procedure: each exposure lasts a full hour. The sitter’s features soften into outline, and the ordinary question a portrait answers — how does this person look? — dissolves within that passing hour.

What remains, in the publisher’s account, is what surrounds each sitter: the room, the stance, the objects that frame a life and supply a context for identity. The publisher describes the collective subjects as forming a wry and melancholy portrait of the absent artist, and draws a comparison to Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who worked in a related vein before Ohara. That comparison is the publisher’s, not a neutral fact about influence. The book’s stated aim is that these portraits create a new identity for each subject in final form rather than record appearance.

As a physical object, *With* pairs its long exposure method with the repetition of 133 plates in an 8-by-10-inch hardcover. Reading it means moving through faces that refuse resolution, one after another, while the surroundings become an alternative source of information about the sitter.

The book rewards slow, repeated looking. It is a portrait book that withholds the portrait, asking the reader to rebuild a person from what the photograph leaves standing: the posture, the setting, and the objects near each figure.