Albert Elm’s This Much is True gathers photographs made across far-flung locations and close to home, among them icebergs, swimming pools and deserts, South Asian workers in Dubai, a marble quarry at Carrara, an industrial pipe system outside Mumbai, tourists photographing the Mona Lisa, graffiti on the separation barrier, and a masked police force in Copenhagen. Elm is the book’s photographer throughout; the editing is shared with Stinus Duch, and the graphic design is by Wrong Studio. What results is not a travelogue in any ordinary sense but a fragmented yet coherent sequence in which the extraordinary and the everyday are given equal weight, so that the world appears as a single, shifting landscape.
Elm’s method is a kind of pseudo-documentary: he photographs what feels significant in the moment and keeps it for later reflection, working in a raw yet playful language that moves between energetic snapshots and dreamlike landscapes. The book follows his debut What Sort of Life is This and reflects on life as he experiences it now, shaped by his age, circumstances and surroundings. Since many of his generation navigate a constant storm of information, alternative ways of living and endless temptations, the photographs come from a wish to understand reality’s many facets and a compulsion to push toward its edges.
This Much is True was published by Disko Bay in January 2026 as a clothbound debossed hardcover of 164 pages, with 91 color and 8 black-and-white plates at 17.6 × 24 cm. It won the Fotobus Library Award 2026. The edition was printed by Narayana Press in a run of 800 copies.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies less in any claim about scarcity than in its construction: a substantial sequence of images, edited by the photographer with Stinus Duch, and a considered physical object from a publisher attentive to photographic books. It extends Elm’s project from a first book into a more encompassing view of how a photographer might hold a chaotic world together on the page.
