Inbal Abergil’s N. O. K.: Next of Kin examines how American families preserve the memory of relatives killed in military conflict. Made between 2014 and 2017, the photographs attend to personal altars, domestic displays, keepsakes, and other objects retained in honor of the dead. Rather than depicting war at the moment of combat, Abergil considers its long aftermath: the private spaces in which absence is given material form and remembrance becomes part of everyday life.

The project is grounded in the experience of Gold Star Families, bringing forms of mourning usually encountered within the home into a broader discussion of war. Abergil’s concentration on possessions is crucial. These objects are neither treated as simple evidence nor reduced to symbols; assembled and cared for by relatives, they occupy a difficult territory between biography, ritual, and family history. The photographs ask how personal effects can carry identity after death—and how domestic acts of commemoration complicate more public narratives of military sacrifice.

Published by Daylight Books in 2017, the 222-page hardcover is organized as a two-volume set. One volume presents the photographs, while the other gathers family testimonials and essays. This separation gives each form its own space while establishing a measured exchange between image and voice. The design also resists allowing photographs to stand as complete explanations of grief: testimony supplies names, memories, and perspectives that objects alone cannot contain.

For collectors concerned with documentary photography, memorial practice, and representations of conflict, N. O. K. deserves attention for the precision of its subject and the ethics of its structure. It relocates the consequences of military history from battlefield imagery to shelves, walls, tables, and family accounts. In doing so, the book records not only what remains after loss, but the sustained work through which remembrance is arranged, narrated, and kept present.