Steven B. Smith photographs Utah, his home state, as it is remade by suburban development. New houses appear against rust-red mountains and blue skies; construction crews and residents occupy the same frame as the terrain they are changing. Radius Books describes the work as peeling back the layers of westward expansion with equal parts subtlety and irony. That description matters because Smith’s subject is not simply growth but the assumptions that drive it, and the pictures are made to register both the scale of the building and the oddness of its setting.
Lydia Millet contributes an essay that places Smith’s photographs within a narrative of an American empire in decline. The book also includes an interview with Katie Lee-Koven. Text and pictures share the volume, giving the sequence a reflective counterpart without turning it into an illustrated argument. Smith, a photographer and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, works here in color, at a scale suited to the landscape, and the book presents 44 images across 80 pages in a hardcover of 14 by 11 inches.
What distinguishes the project is its sustained attention to one state and one ongoing transformation, rather than a survey of the West at large. Smith watches a particular social and physical process unfold, and the book’s structure supports that concentration, moving between houses, land, and the people who make and inhabit both. The title borrows a phrase associated with Dr. Seuss, an odd echo for a body of work about land development, and the friction between that phrasing and the photographs is part of what the book holds.
For collectors of contemporary landscape photography, the volume’s interest lies in this combination: a regional subject examined over time, paired with an essay that supplies historical context and an interview that extends the conversation. It is a compact, carefully produced book from a publisher known for attention to photographic sequencing and design, and it documents a transformation that continues across the American West.
