East Palo Alto takes as its subject a city separated from affluent Palo Alto by Highway 101, yet inseparable from the larger story of Silicon Valley. Published by Lulu.com in 2017, Dan Fenstermacher’s 38-page paperback addresses the sharp proximity of technological wealth and economic disparity through a tightly bounded study of place.

Fenstermacher made the photographs with a discarded Polaroid camera. The choice supplies more than an incidental aesthetic device: the book draws a deliberate correspondence between an abandoned camera and a community treated as peripheral to its prosperous surroundings. That analogy gives the project its conceptual structure, directing attention toward what dominant accounts of Silicon Valley may leave outside the frame.

Rather than attempting a comprehensive social history, the book concentrates on the changing landscape of technology and income. Its scale is correspondingly concise. The restricted page count and single-location focus keep the relationship among geography, photographic means, and economic division in close view. Highway 101 becomes both an actual boundary and the organizing fact behind the work’s contrast between neighboring places.

For a serious photobook collection, the significance of East Palo Alto lies in this precise alignment of subject and method. It belongs within histories of photography concerned with overlooked urban communities, regional inequality, and the social consequences surrounding centers of technological power. The use of a cast-off instant camera also makes the book relevant to collections examining how photographic equipment can carry metaphorical weight. Compact and geographically specific, Fenstermacher’s publication preserves a pointed view of Silicon Valley from the side too often treated as its margin.