Justine Kurland’s This Train, published by MACK in 2024, takes the form of a leporello-bound hardcover: a concertina structure that lets two bodies of work unfold in relation to one another. The book draws on road trips across the United States that Kurland made with her young child between 2005 and 2010. Its two narratives are interwoven but distinct.

One strand gathers large-format photographs of Kurland and her child, separated from the images of roads, trains, infrastructure, and fellow travelers she was making at the same time. Revisited in this sequence, they propose an anti-history of family and travel. The familiar family album is upended; in its place is a story of queer motherhood and image-making aligned with Kurland’s maternal line, for whom crossing the American landscape was a matter of dire necessity.

The other side of the concertina presents Kurland’s photographs of railroads crossing the continent. These pictures dismantle the railway’s familiar mythology as a pioneering symbol of modernity. They attend instead to how routes carve and stain the land, often overwhelmed by surrounding nature, leaving behind barren strips of sun-stained asphalt and eerily perfect parallel tracks. New texts by Constance Debré and Lily Cho bookend the volume. Together, the photographs treat the American landscape as a fabricated tableau—a cultural fable that conceals histories of Chinese migrant labor and the human cost of freedom. Kurland re-appraises a set of paradigms that retain a tenacious grip on contemporary American life: the nuclear family, the open road, the violence of expansion, and the intractable force of the land itself.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies in this doubled structure and its insistence on the photobook as an argument. The leporello format is not a gimmick but a means of holding two histories in tension: the intimate and the infrastructural, the maternal and the national. This Train is a limited edition of 1,000 signed copies, including a signed and numbered print handmade by the artist. The hardcover is debossed, with two flaps and a tipped-in image on the front cover; 102 pages. It deserves attention for how carefully it rethinks the family album and the road trip as forms, and for the way its physical design extends that thinking.