Stephen Shore has spent a long career showing what a camera can record. The Mental Image turns to what happens around that act: how photographs are imagined, sensed, and carried in the body. MACK publishes the book in August 2026 as a sequel to Shore’s The Nature of Photographs, moving from the surface of pictures to the interior life of images.

Across 112 pages, Shore assembles anecdotes, influences, references, and teaching material rather than building a single argument. Visualisation, attention, and embodiment run through the book, treated as learned skills and as habits of mind. The result is practical in temper and philosophical in reach — a photographer’s account of looking, written for photographers, artists, and readers drawn to perception itself.

The Nature of Photographs, published in 2013, addressed how a photograph works: its frame, its time, its description of the world. This companion volume asks what the person behind and in front of the camera brings to that transaction. Shore’s authority here comes from long practice as photographer, writer, and teacher, and the illustrations serve the text instead of competing with it.

For a collector, the interest lies in continuity and in kind. This is a compact paperback — 21 × 24.5 cm, 112 pages — conceived as a book to be used, annotated, and reread, which places it with Shore’s writing rather than with his picture books. Read beside the earlier volume, it clarifies an argument he has been developing across decades; read alone, it stands as a considered statement on attention. Either way, it documents a side of Shore’s thinking that photographs alone do not fully show.