J Carrier’s *Mi’raj* takes its title from the Arabic word for ladder or ascension, and from the night journey that, in Islamic tradition, carried the Prophet Muhammad from the “farthest place”—the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City—to heaven. The book, Carrier’s first full-length monograph with TIS Books, was made over several years in the Old City, East and West Jerusalem, and other parts of the West Bank. What he photographs there are not events but surfaces and structures: facades, stones, the tangible residue of millennia of belief. Writing in the publisher’s catalogue, Carrier calls the work “both examination and exhumation,” an attempt to let the immaterial essence of a contested land emerge through concrete objects.
The approach is iterative and recursive. Rather than building a single linear argument, Carrier arranges fragments from parallel and divergent realities into a photographic landscape. The book’s 176 pages hold eighty-eight tritone images; its dimensions—196 by 307 millimetres—give the sequence a vertical reach that suits a subject concerned with ascent and with limits. The softcover is wrapped in a dust jacket with silkscreen and housed in a black high-gloss silkscreen sleeve. The design is not incidental. It frames the reading as an encounter with an object, not merely a set of pictures.
Carrier’s earlier book *Elementary Calculus* (MACK, 2012) considered distance and destination, hope and providence. *Mi’raj* extends those concerns into more recent preoccupations: faith, futility, and the possibility of transcendence. The ascension narrative gives his exploration of human aspiration a framework. Rather than treating a photograph of a sacred place as proof of a particular belief, the sequence allows material surfaces to carry overlapping histories. Stone and facade become points of contact between what can be seen and what remains a matter of faith.
*Mi’raj* was awarded the 2024 Lucie Photo Book Prize in the Independent category. The book is a serious object for collectors interested in how photography handles sacred terrain without illustration or polemic, and in how a photographer can turn a theological narrative into a structure for seeing.
