In 2014, stranded in a foreign city with more free time than outlets for it, Alex Yudzon began rearranging the furniture in his hotel room and photographing what he built. Over the years the practice hardened into a discipline: he uses only the furniture already in the room, he works alone and in secret, and after the pictures are made he dismantles the installation and returns the room to its original condition. The photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime-scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpired during his stay.

A Room for the Night gathers work made under these constraints in American hotels, though it is not a survey of American lodging. Yudzon treats the hotel room as a liminal zone operating beyond the codes and conventions that govern the outside world, and the furniture he stacks, leans and balances turns generic interiors into configurations where the laws of physics seem suspended and dormant emotions surface. Dark humor, loneliness and creative obsession hold together in a single frame. The project also attends to the hotels themselves, the people who own and operate them, the communities in which they are based, and the journeys connecting them.

Radius Books presents the series as a hardcover of 128 pages with 54 images. Photography and text are by Yudzon, and the volume includes a conversation with Sharon Core. The sequence asks to be read as episodes of a sustained undertaking rather than a run of spectacular setups.

Yudzon’s project sits at the meeting point of photography, sculpture and performance: each image is the residue of an action that has already been undone. Because the installation is temporary and evidence of it exists chiefly through the camera, the book functions as the primary record of a practice whose central events cannot be revisited. For viewers drawn to staged photography in which the conditions of making are inseparable from the meaning of the result, this volume clarifies the terms of that method.