Adam Fuss made My Ghost with cameraless methods. The works gathered here include photograms, in which light and chemistry record what was placed on or near the paper, and daguerreotypes, whose mirrored surfaces hold an image while reflecting the viewer. Across these plates the subject is loss: a nineteenth-century child’s dress laid out, its wearer absent; birds scattering in a grey dusk; smoke and flame-like forms in darkness. Neville Wakefield’s story gives the sequence a literary register, and the book’s sequencing and tritone and four-color reproduction accompany the argument, stated in the publisher’s description, that photographic imagery need not pass through a lens.

Fuss has long worked at the edges of the medium. This series dates from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when individual images circulated as daguerreotypes, unique gelatin silver photograms, and related prints. Twin Palms Publishers issued the collection in hardcover in March 2002 at 11 by 15 inches, with 64 pages. The large page gives the reproductions room, while the book brings works made through different photographic processes into a shared reading context.

For readers, the book’s interest lies in how it holds a single body of work together. It gathers this series in one volume and pairs Fuss’s images with Wakefield’s story as a distinct collaboration. The relationship between a surviving object and an absent person gives the title a concrete point of reference, while leaving the emotional meaning open. The format is substantial, and the reproduced surfaces reward attention to print quality.

This is not a survey of Fuss’s career. It is a concentrated book about one series and one idea, and it rewards slow looking: the dress, the birds, the daguerreotype surfaces that never completely give up their secrets. Readers who know Fuss’s cameraless work will find the central concerns stated directly here; those new to it can approach the relationship between photographic process and the experience of absence.