The book began with a series of chance encounters. Adam Broomberg and Gersande Spelsberg made a hundred photographs together — Spelsberg sitting for Broomberg, neither working from a fixed script — and that collaboration shapes Glitter in My Wounds, a seventy-two-page hardback published by MACK in October 2021.

The portraits were shot on 5 x 4 inch negative and lit only by the sun and by mirrors, the same method Helmar Lerski used in Metamorphosis Through Light. The constraint is not decorative. It strips away studio apparatus and leaves the sitter exposed to a moving, reflected light, so each frame registers a different person without pretending to be a different one.

Running alongside the images is Spelsberg’s account of transitioning, which turns the portraits toward the conditions — social, medical, inherited — that assign gender roles before anyone has had a say in them. CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals gave Broomberg a working method for confronting identities that had felt fixed and immutable; the poem “Glitter in My Wounds” came into the project later, its shimmer answering photographs already made.

What sets the book apart is that it is a meeting of three practices rather than one photographer’s project with a subject. Spelsberg is credited as collaborator; CAConrad as author. The design — hardback with tip-in, 20 x 25 cm — carries portraits and poetics in a single sequence, an iconoclastic arrangement rather than a survey of a body of work.

For a collector, the interest lies in that arrangement and in how plainly the collaboration is acknowledged. Here is a book that refuses the categories it might have settled into, made by three people who each treat instability as a method rather than a problem to be solved.