Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s Index 2025 brings photographs into contact with cuts, folds, citations and terms. Published by Roma Publications, it asks how meaning changes when an image is encountered as part of a constructed book. Rather than offering a single place or event as its organizing subject, the publication makes the instability of photographic meaning a problem the reader can examine through its materials. Its 412 pages combine black-and-white illustrations with English text.
Roma’s account locates the project’s possible beginnings in several disparate circumstances: congressional Kente cloth, summer camps and the material uncertainty of social distance. These references resist being reduced to a straightforward origin story. The publisher’s description of Wolukau-Wanambwa as both artist and critic is useful here: images and language belong to the same inquiry, and the construction of the book becomes part of that inquiry rather than a neutral container for finished pictures.
Roger Willems designed the volume, which measures 23 by 28 centimetres. Its visible spiral binding and cut-out cover give a concrete introduction to the importance of its physical structure. In shortlisting the book for the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award, the jury highlighted the relationship between material form and reading: details emerge, relationships between images are disrupted, and the apparent stability of documentary photographs is reconsidered. This recognition concerns the book’s photographic argument as well as its production.
For a collector interested in how artists use publishing to think through photography, Index 2025 offers a specific case study. Its attraction lies in the interaction of photographic images, quoted material and designed interventions, not simply in the number of images assembled. The Roma edition makes those relationships available for repeated examination; returning to the pages can mean attending to a different connection between an image, a term and the structure that brings them together.
