Ray Johnson spent four decades making himself indispensable to an art world he kept at arm’s length. A pioneer of both Pop and mail art, he was described as New York’s most famous unknown artist, and the collages that carried his reputation are dense, allusive and difficult to mistake for anyone else’s. He stopped exhibiting in 1991. He did not stop working.

Between 1992 and 1994 he carried 137 disposable cameras through the places around his home in Locust Valley, Long Island — parking lots, sidewalks, beaches, cemeteries — and set his own artworks down among them. The resulting photographs fold ordinary surroundings into the work itself, so that everyday “real life” becomes one of the picture’s materials rather than its backdrop. Within a few months Johnson had also devised a large, freestanding format for the simplified collages he called the “movie stars” of these camera tableaux.

Johnson swam to his death at sea on 13 January 1995, leaving a vast archive that included more than three thousand of these late photographs. The “new career as a photographer” he claimed for himself makes its print debut here. The book accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, from 17 June to 2 October 2022, and includes an essay by the curator Joel Smith, who also edits the volume. It runs to 256 pages as a quarterbound flexi hardcover, published by MACK in June 2022.

For a collector, the draw is not another gathering of the collages but the arrival of a body of work made on unassuming terms: disposable cameras, ordinary locations, an artist working through the last years of his life with no gallery in view. The first audience for these pictures was an archive. Read in sequence, they show a habit of invention sustained across four decades and continued with an instrument nobody would have chosen for posterity — and they invite a second look at everything Johnson made before them.