Sasha Phyars-Burgess made her first book under a deliberately bare title: Untitled. Published by Capricious, the volume gathers three separate bodies of work rather than a single continuous series, a structure that lets the photographer move between registers instead of settling into one. As a first-generation American born to Trinidadian parents, Phyars-Burgess works through questions of heritage and its unsettled history, and the pictures register that thinking in a range of temperatures — some quiet and meditative, others openly vivid and energetic.

The book is not photography alone. It carries poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, an essay by Bill Gaskins, and a conversation between Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable, and Carolyn Lazard. Image-making remains the spine of the project, but the written contributions place the photographs in a discursive field, where looking is argued about as much as felt.

Recognition came early. Untitled won the 2021 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, where the jury treated it as an example of a fresh perspective; shortlist juror Darius Himes said the book “takes a position, states an opinion, and doesn’t pull any punches.” That kind of statement about a debut is worth weighing. It describes a book that has already decided what it is for.

For collectors, the case rests on the work rather than on scarcity claims. This is a debut monograph from an artist whose concerns — family, migration, Black life, the meanings carried by space — are pursued across three related bodies of work, with a strong collaborative apparatus and an early award record behind it. The softcover edition, published by Capricious, is the form in which that argument was first made.