Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2016, Monika Macdonald’s *In Absence* is a study of privacy as both a physical condition and a psychological space. Its photographs attend to people who appear absorbed in relationships, gestures, or thoughts not arranged for the viewer’s benefit. Rather than making intimacy readily available, Macdonald allows the camera to approach a private world while preserving its separateness.

The book moves between tender contact and solitary inwardness. A touch exchanged between two people and an individual’s self-contained moment belong to the same emotional register: each suggests a life continuing beyond the photograph. Macdonald has described the attraction of her subjects as emanating from the people portrayed rather than being imposed by the observer. That distinction gives the work its particular tension. Looking becomes an act of proximity without possession, and erotic charge is held alongside reserve.

Across 42 color illustrations, the emphasis remains on portraiture, women, and the subtle boundaries between exposure and withdrawal. The title does not simply indicate emptiness; it also frames what the camera cannot secure—the thoughts, histories, and private bonds that remain outside the image. Absence therefore operates within presence, shaping how each figure can be seen but not fully known.

The 72-page hardcover has a landscape format of approximately 22.8 × 28.8 cm, giving Macdonald’s photographs room to be considered as a sustained body rather than as isolated pictures. For a photobook collection, its interest lies in this concentrated relationship between subject and spectator: a concise, materially substantial publication in which intimacy is neither spectacle nor confession, but a carefully maintained distance.